timegm() equivalent function in Python?

[Rick Forrister]

Working on converting a collection of perl utilities I've written for
projects to Python.  Am encountering a problem in time conversions; we
need to process date strings from a YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.SSSSSZ format
(Zulu time = GMT = UTC) into unix epoch date format.  time module does
not list function which takes as input a time tuple and returns UTC
based epoch time.  Is there such a module out there somewhere?

Parsing the string from the ascii format mentioned above into date &
time chunks is no problem of course, split handles that quite nicely. 
It's the conversion from a UTC based tuple set -> epoch time value that
I need.

Appreciate
     rickf
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