Write and read Datetime to binary format in Python

Question

I want to store a list of datetimes in a binary file in Python.

EDIT: by \"binary\" I mean the best digital representation for each datatype. The application for thi

Answer 1

I have found a way using the Unix timestamp and storing it as an integer. This works for me because I don't need a subsecond resolution, but I think long integers would allow for microsecond resolution with some modifications of the code.

The changes from my original consist in replacing calendar.timegm by time.mktime and also utctimetuple by timetuple, to keep everything naive.

This:

import datetime
import struct
import time

now = datetime.datetime.now()
print now

stamp = time.mktime(now.timetuple())
print stamp

recoverstamp = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(stamp)
print recoverstamp

binarydatetime = struct.pack('

Returns this:

2013-09-02 11:06:28.064000
1378130788.0
2013-09-02 11:06:28
1378130788
2013-09-02 11:06:28

From this, I can easily write the packed binarydatetime to file, and read it back later.