Taken from Linus' original code in /git/date.c, approxidate gives you a dead-simple way to get a timestamp from tons of date formats. Unlike git's original approxidate, this approxidate also returns microseconds.

There's only one function: int approxidate(const char *date, struct timeval *t). It returns 0 when it parsed the date, -1 when it couldn't.

When compiling, copy both approxidate.{c,h} to your project, link in the math library (-lm), and you're good.

#include <approxidate.h>

struct timeval t;
approxidate("10/Mar/2013:12:43:02.603 -0500", &t);
approxidate("10/Mar/2013:12:43:02 -0500", &t);

Note: If no timezone is given, the system's local timezone is used.

For more, see test.c.

From benchmark.c (for 1,000,000 iterations):

$ make

rm -f test
gcc -g -Wall -O2 -std=gnu99 benchmark.c approxidate.c -lm -o benchmark

approxidate time: 0.363872
strptime time: 0.622350

Check out: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/approxidate