How to test if a given time-stamp is in seconds or milliseconds?

Question

Assume a given variable, it is containing a UNIX time-stamp, but whether it is in seconds or milliseconds format is unknown, I want to assign to a variable which i

Answer 1

An alternative to the answer given by Martin:

We've encountered this problem when we had to unify timestamps for documents coming in from 3rd parties. While the previous condition was:

if date > time.time():
    use_miliseconds(date)
else:
    use_seconds(date)

, and it seems like it should work, there are edge cases, especially if date was derived from a string representation without timezone info, or the clocks are being changed.

A safer variant would be to use:

if date > time.time() + HUNDRED_YEARS:
    use_miliseconds(date)
else:
    use_seconds(date)

, where HUNDRED_YEARS = 100 * 365 * 24 * 3600. This condition is much more error prone, in fact, it works for any date except January and February 1970 (which are ambiguous either way).