What was midnight yesterday as an epoch time?

Question

I\'m trying to get my head around the datetime module. I know the time now as an epoch and the time an event last happened (as an epoch time). What I need to do is figure

Answer 1

In my estimation, many date and time manipulations are easier to do, and to understand, using the arrow library. This is one of them.

Create an arbitrary date and time.

>>> import arrow
>>> arbitrary = arrow.get(2017,8,16,11,5)

Calculate midnight_yesterday: first, midnight of arbitrary as its 'day' floor; then shift this back by one day. Display the result.

>>> midnight_yesterday = arbitrary.floor('day').shift(days=-1)
>>> midnight_yesterday 
<Arrow [2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00]>

Use timestamp for the desired overall result, for Python 3.3+.

>>> midnight_yesterday.datetime.timestamp()
1502755200.0

Or use this expression for Python 2.7. (Credit: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11743262/131187 for the latter two expressions.)

>>> (midnight_yesterday-arrow.get(1970,1,1)).total_seconds()
1502755200.0