How to convert a time string to seconds?

A little more pythonic way I think would be:

timestr = '00:04:23'

ftr = [3600,60,1]

sum([a*b for a,b in zip(ftr, map(int,timestr.split(':')))])

Output is 263Sec.

I would be interested to see if anyone could simplify it further.

To get the timedelta(), you should subtract 1900-01-01:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.strptime('01:01:09,000', '%H:%M:%S,%f')
datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1, 1, 1, 9)
>>> td = datetime.strptime('01:01:09,000', '%H:%M:%S,%f') - datetime(1900,1,1)
>>> td
datetime.timedelta(0, 3669)
>>> td.total_seconds() # 2.7+
3669.0

%H above implies the input is less than a day, to support the time difference more than a day:

>>> import re
>>> from datetime import timedelta
>>> td = timedelta(**dict(zip("hours minutes seconds milliseconds".split(),
...                           map(int, re.findall('\d+', '31:01:09,000')))))
>>> td
datetime.timedelta(1, 25269)
>>> td.total_seconds()
111669.0

To emulate .total_seconds() on Python 2.6:

>>> from __future__ import division
>>> ((td.days * 86400 + td.seconds) * 10**6 + td.microseconds) / 10**6
111669.0

without imports

time = "01:34:11"
sum(x * int(t) for x, t in zip([3600, 60, 1], time.split(":"))) 

>>> import datetime
>>> import time
>>> x = time.strptime('00:01:00,000'.split(',')[0],'%H:%M:%S')
>>> datetime.timedelta(hours=x.tm_hour,minutes=x.tm_min,seconds=x.tm_sec).total_seconds()
60.0