Help me translate long value, expressed in hex, back in to a date/time

Question

I have a date value, which I\'m told is 8 bytes, a single \"long\" (aka int64) value, and converted to hex:

60f347d15798c901

How can I convert

Answer 1

If it is the same type of 64 bit hex NTP timestamp as described here, then you should be splitting the hex string equally in two, that is, imagine a separator between the first 8 hex digits and the other 8.

Convert the first half (first 32 bits' worth) into an integer with hexdec(), and this integer will be the date value in Unix timestamp format (seconds since Jan 1 1970 GMT) which you can then use in the date() function, etc.

The second part is fractional sections, useful if you need accuracy finer than one second (though not many applications do, and PHP's built in date and time functions don't except for microtime()). You would also convert this to decimal with hexdec().