Hi! We are tryint to access time data stored in an SQL The
> query returns a date object of type DbiDate. When printed,
> we get a nicely formatted text date. If cast into a float or
> int, you get the number of seconds elapsed since
> 1/1/1970. The way we are dealing with the conversion from
> this format into MPL format is:through time.strptime (using
> a format string), then converting that into a datetime
> object, and finally invoking MPL's date2num.
> Is there a better, quicker more obvious way to accomplish
> this?
Seconds since 1/1/1970 is often called "seconds since the epoch" and
mpl provides a conversion routine for dates in this form
from matplotlib.dates import epoch2num
e = int(mydate) # convert your date to seconds since epoch
d = epoch2num(e) # a mpl datenum
epoch2num also works over arrays or sequences of epochs.
JDH