Convert pandas DateTimeIndex to Unix Time?

Question

What is the idiomatic way of converting a pandas DateTimeIndex to (an iterable of) Unix Time? This is probably not the way to go:

[time.mktime(t.timetuple()         


        

Answer 1

To address the case of NaT, which above solutions will convert to large negative ints, in pandas>=0.24 a possible solution would be:

def datetime_to_epoch(ser):
    """Don't convert NaT to large negative values."""
    if ser.hasnans:
        res = ser.dropna().astype('int64').astype('Int64').reindex(index=ser.index)
    else:
        res = ser.astype('int64')

    return res // 10**9

In the case of missing values this will return the nullable int type 'Int64' (ExtensionType pd.Int64Dtype):

In [5]: dt = pd.to_datetime(pd.Series(["2019-08-21", "2018-07-28", np.nan]))                                                                                                                                                                                                    
In [6]: datetime_to_epoch(dt)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
Out[6]: 
0    1566345600
1    1532736000
2           NaN
dtype: Int64

Otherwise a regular int64:

In [7]: datetime_to_epoch(dt[:2])                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
Out[7]: 
0    1566345600
1    1532736000
dtype: int64