Converting unix timestamp string to readable date

Question

I have a string representing a unix timestamp (i.e. \"1284101485\") in Python, and I\'d like to convert it to a readable date. When I use time.strftime, I get a

Answer 1

Use datetime module:

from datetime import datetime
ts = int("1284101485")

# if you encounter a "year is out of range" error the timestamp
# may be in milliseconds, try `ts /= 1000` in that case
print(datetime.utcfromtimestamp(ts).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'))

Answer 2

The most voted answer suggests using fromtimestamp which is error prone since it uses the local timezone. To avoid issues a better approach is to use UTC:

datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(posix_time).strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')

Where posix_time is the Posix epoch time you want to convert

Answer 3

import datetime
temp = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(1386181800).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
print temp

Answer 4

You can convert the current time like this

t=datetime.fromtimestamp(time.time())
t.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
'2012-03-07'

To convert a date in string to different formats.

import datetime,time

def createDateObject(str_date,strFormat="%Y-%m-%d"):    
    timeStamp = time.mktime(time.strptime(str_date,strFormat))
    return datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(timeStamp)

def FormatDate(objectDate,strFormat="%Y-%m-%d"):
    return objectDate.strftime(strFormat)

Usage
=====
o=createDateObject('2013-03-03')
print FormatDate(o,'%d-%m-%Y')

Output 03-03-2013

Answer 5

For a human readable timestamp from a UNIX timestamp, I have used this in scripts before:

import os, datetime

datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(float(os.path.getmtime("FILE"))).strftime("%B %d, %Y")

Output:

'December 26, 2012'

Answer 6

timestamp ="124542124"
value = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp)
exct_time = value.strftime('%d %B %Y %H:%M:%S')

Get the readable date from timestamp with time also, also you can change the format of the date.