Converting unix timestamp string to readable date

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:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(1172969203.1)
datetime.datetime(2007, 3, 4, 0, 46, 43, 100000)

Taken from http://seehuhn.de/pages/pdate

Answer #3:

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 #4:

>>> import time
>>> time.ctime(int("1284101485"))
'Fri Sep 10 16:51:25 2010'
>>> time.strftime("%D %H:%M", time.localtime(int("1284101485")))
'09/10/10 16:51'

Answer #5:

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

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)"))

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))

Answer #6:

In Python 3.6+:

import datetime
timestamp = 1579117901
value = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(timestamp)
print(f"{value:%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}")

Output (in UTC)

2020-01-15 19:51:41

Explanation

• Line #1: Import datetime library.
• Line #2: Unix time which is seconds since 1970-01-01.
• Line #3: Converts this to a unix time object, check with: type(value)
• Line #4: Prints in the same format as strp.

Bonus

To save the date to a string then print it, use this:

my_date = f"{value:%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S}"
print(my_date)

Answer #7:

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 #8:

Other than using time/datetime package, pandas can also be used to solve the same problem.Here is how we can use pandas to convert timestamp to readable date:

Timestamps can be in two formats:

1. 13 digits(milliseconds) –
   To convert milliseconds to date, use:

   import pandas
   result_ms=pandas.to_datetime('1493530261000',unit='ms')
   str(result_ms)
   Output: '2017-04-30 05:31:01'
   

2. 10 digits(seconds) –
   To convert seconds to date, use:

   import pandas
   result_s=pandas.to_datetime('1493530261',unit='s')
   str(result_s)
   Output: '2017-04-30 05:31:01'