Error while converting date to timestamp in python

Your date should be a string. Here is how you do it. (If your date is an integer then just do date = str(date).

>>> import time
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> date = '20130814100000'
>>> dt = datetime.strptime(date, '%Y%m%d%H%M%S')
>>> print dt
2013-08-14 10:00:00
>>> print time.mktime(dt.timetuple())
1376467200.0

time also has a strptime function but it returns a not so useful struct_time object. But if you only need a unix time, then you can use it too:

>>> time.mktime(time.strptime(date, '%Y%m%d%H%M%S'))
1376467200.0

I think the problem here is that .fromtimestamp() is expecting a Unix timestamp, not a date formatted as YYYYmmdd...

To parse the date information that you do have there, I'd recommend using .strptime() or the excellent python-dateutil package.

import datetime

def ts(date):
    stamp = datetime.datetime.strptime(date, '%Y%m%d%H%M%S')
    return stamp.strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S')

or

from dateutil.parser import parse

def ts(date):
    stamp = parse(date)
    return stamp.strftime('%Y%m%d%H%M%S')

http://labix.org/python-dateutil

• The function that parses datetime is called strptime, not strftime (which formats time).
• 20130814100000 is not an UNIX timestamp
• strptime takes string as argument

Overall, your code should look like:

import datetime

def ts(date):
    return datetime.datetime.strptime(date, '%Y%m%d%H%M%S')

if __name__ == "__main__":
    date = "20130814100000"
    print ts(date)

You seem to have some confusion over the different ways that times are represented. The value you have assigned to date appears to already be a formatted timestring of "2013-08-14 10:00:00", but you're passing it into fromtimestamp. This function expects a Unix timestamp, which is simply the number of seconds that have elapsed since Midnight on Jan 1st 1970.

I believe something like this is what you're looking for:

import datetime

def ts(datestr):
    return datetime.datetime.strptime(datestr, "%Y%m%d%H%M%S")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    date = 20130814100000
    print ts(date)

strftime like you had is for formatting times into strings. strptime is for parsing strings into times.