have a look at the parsedate() method in the RFC822 package.
It may help you if your date is in "Internet format"
"parsedate(StringDate)
Attempts to parse a date according to the rules in RFC 2822. however,
some mailers don't follow that format as specified, so parsedate() tries
to guess correctly in such cases. date is a string containing an RFC
2822 date, such as 'Mon, 20 Nov 1995 19:12:08 -0500'. If it succeeds in
parsing the date, parsedate() returns a 9-tuple that can be passed
directly to time.mktime(); otherwise None will be returned. Note that
fields 6, 7, and 8 of the result tuple are not usable."
Leif K-Brooks wrote:
PHP has a very nice strtotime function (http://php.net/strtotime) which
converts a date/time in virtually any format into a timestamp. Does
Python have a similar function?