Using mktime to convert date to seconds since epoch - omitting elements from the tuple?

[Barry Scott]

On 2 Jan 2013, at 08:01, Victor Hooi <victorhooi at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm using pysvn to checkout a specific revision based on date - pysvn will only accept a date in terms of seconds since the epoch.
> 
> I'm attempting to use time.mktime() to convert a date (e.g. "2012-02-01) to seconds since epoch.
> 
> According to the docs, mktime expects a 9-element tuple.
> 
> My question is, how should I omit elements from this tuple? And what is the expected behaviour when I do that?
> 
> For example, (zero-index), element 6 is the day of the week, and element 7 is the day in the year, out of 366 - if I specify the earlier elements, then I shouldn't really need to specify these.
> 
> However, the docs don't seem to talk much about this.
> 
> I just tried testing putting garbage numbers for element 6 and 7, whilst specifying the earlier elements:
> 
>> time.mktime((2012, 5, 5, 23, 59, 59, 23424234, 5234234 ,0 ))
> 
> It seems to have no effect what numbers I set 6 and 7 to - is that because the earlier elements are set?

> 
> How should I properly omit them? Is this all documented somewhere? What is the minimum I need to specify? And what happens to the fields I don't specify?

See the python docs the tuple is fully documented.
6 and 7 are not needed to figure out the seconds so are ignored.

Did you notice the parse_datetime.py that is in the pysvn Client Example? Its a rather
over the top date and time parser I wrote a long long time ago. (Which is missing some imports,
hmm I cannot have tested this for a long time). It can parse things like "yesterday 10:34".

Barry