Parsing unix time in C#

Question

Is there a way to quickly / easily parse Unix time in C# ? I\'m brand new at the language, so if this is a painfully obvious question, I apologize. IE I have a string in th

Answer 1

Hooray for MSDN DateTime docs! Also see TimeSpan.

// First make a System.DateTime equivalent to the UNIX Epoch.
System.DateTime dateTime = new System.DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);
// Add the number of seconds in UNIX timestamp to be converted.
dateTime = dateTime.AddSeconds(numSeconds);
// Then add the number of milliseconds
dateTime = dateTime.Add(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(numMilliseconds));

Answer 2

This is a very common thing people in C# do, yet there is no library for that.

I created this mini library https://gist.github.com/1095252 to make my life (I hope yours too) easier.

Answer 3

Simplest way is probably to use something like:

private static readonly DateTime Epoch = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 
                                                      DateTimeKind.Utc);

...
public static DateTime UnixTimeToDateTime(string text)
{
    double seconds = double.Parse(text, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
    return Epoch.AddSeconds(seconds);
}

Three things to note:

• If your strings are definitely of the form "x.y" rather than "x,y" you should use the invariant culture as shown above, to make sure that "." is parsed as a decimal point
• You should specify UTC in the DateTime constructor to make sure it doesn't think it's a local time.
• If you're using .NET 3.5 or higher, you might want to consider using DateTimeOffset instead of DateTime.