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

There are two parts:

1. Convert the unix timestamp ("seconds since epoch") to the local time
2. Display the local time in the desired format.

A portable way to get the local time that works even if the local time zone had a different utc offset in the past and python has no access to the tz database is to use a pytz timezone:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime
import tzlocal  # $ pip install tzlocal

unix_timestamp = float("1284101485")
local_timezone = tzlocal.get_localzone() # get pytz timezone
local_time = datetime.fromtimestamp(unix_timestamp, local_timezone)

To display it, you could use any time format that is supported by your system e.g.:

print(local_time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f%z (%Z)"))
print(local_time.strftime("%B %d %Y"))  # print date in your format

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If you do not need a local time, to get a readable UTC time instead:

utc_time = datetime.utcfromtimestamp(unix_timestamp)
print(utc_time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f+00:00 (UTC)"))

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If you don't care about the timezone issues that might affect what date is returned or if python has access to the tz database on your system:

local_time = datetime.fromtimestamp(unix_timestamp)
print(local_time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f"))

On Python 3, you could get a timezone-aware datetime using only stdlib (the UTC offset may be wrong if python has no access to the tz database on your system e.g., on Windows):

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from datetime import datetime, timezone

utc_time = datetime.fromtimestamp(unix_timestamp, timezone.utc)
local_time = utc_time.astimezone()
print(local_time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f%z (%Z)"))

Functions from the time module are thin wrappers around the corresponding C API and therefore they may be less portable than the corresponding datetime methods otherwise you could use them too:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import time

unix_timestamp  = int("1284101485")
utc_time = time.gmtime(unix_timestamp)
local_time = time.localtime(unix_timestamp)
print(time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", local_time)) 
print(time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S+00:00 (UTC)", utc_time))