ISO 8601 Time Representation
The international standard ISO 8601 describes a string representation for dates and times. Two simple examples of this format are
2010-12-16 17:22:15
20101216T172215
(which both stand for the 16th of December 2010), but the format also allows for sub-second resolution times and to specify time zones. This format is of course not Python-specific, but it is good for storing dates and times in a portable format. Details about this format can be found in the Markus Kuhn entry.
I recommend use of this format to store times in files.
One way to get the current time in this representation is to use strftime from the time module in the Python standard library:
>>> from time import strftime
>>> strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
'2010-03-03 21:16:45'
You can use the strptime constructor of the datetime class:
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.strptime("2010-06-04 21:08:12", "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
datetime.datetime(2010, 6, 4, 21, 8, 12)
The most robust is the Egenix mxDateTime module:
>>> from mx.DateTime.ISO import ParseDateTimeUTC
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> x = ParseDateTimeUTC("2010-06-04 21:08:12")
>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(x)
datetime.datetime(2010, 3, 6, 21, 8, 12)
References