title: Parsing hh:mm in Python
body: <p>Sometimes I get a string like "02:40" indicating 2 hours and 40 minutes. I'd like to parse that string into the number of minutes (160 in this case) using Python.</p>
  
  <p>Sure, I can parse the string and multiply the hours by 60, but is there something in the standard lib that does this?</p>