django Datefield to Unix timestamp

Question

In a model I have a such field: mydate = models.DateField()

now a javascript graph function requires unix timestamp such as \"1196550000000\", how can I return the u

Answer 1

edit: please check the second answer, it has a much better solution

In python code, you can do this to convert a date or datetime to the Unix Epoch

import time
epoch = int(time.mktime(mydate.timetuple())*1000)

This doesn't work in a Django template though, so you need a custom filter, e.g:

import time

from django import template

register = template.Library()

@register.filter
def epoch(value):
    try:
        return int(time.mktime(value.timetuple())*1000)
    except AttributeError:
        return ''