How to convert datetime date to UTC timestamp in Python

Question

I need to convert date to UTC timestamps to be used inside Javascript.

The following code does not work:

>>> d = datetime.date(2018,10,31)
>>> datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(time.mktime(d.timetuple()))
datetime.datetime(2018, 10, 31, 23, 0)

Converting the date object first to datetime also does not help. I tried the example at this link from, but:

from pytz import utc, timezone
from datetime import datetime
from time import mktime
input_date = datetime(year=2011, month=1, day=15)

and now either:

mktime(utc.localize(input_date).utctimetuple())

or

mktime(timezone('US/Eastern').localize(input_date).utctimetuple())

does work.

Answer 1

In Python 3 (< 3.3)

From the docs for datetime.utcfromtimestamp():

There is no method to obtain the timestamp from a datetime instance, but POSIX timestamp corresponding to a datetime instance dt can be easily calculated as follows. For a naive dt:

timestamp = (dt - datetime(1970, 1, 1)) / timedelta(seconds=1)

And for an aware dt:

timestamp = (dt - datetime(1970,1,1, tzinfo=timezone.utc)) / timedelta(seconds=1)