How do I extract the created date out of a Mongo ObjectID

Question

I\'m using the Mongo shell to query my Mongo db. I want to use the timestamp contained in the ObjectID as part of my query and also as a column to extract into output. I h

Answer 1

In python you can do this:

>>> from bson.objectid import ObjectId
>>> gen_time = datetime.datetime(2010, 1, 1)
>>> dummy_id = ObjectId.from_datetime(gen_time)
>>> result = collection.find({"_id": {"$lt": dummy_id}})

I think, ObjectId.from_datetime() - its a useful method of standard bson lib Maybe other language bindings have alternative builtin function. Source: http://api.mongodb.org/python/current/api/bson/objectid.html