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 TypeError:

>>>import time
>>>print time.strftime("%B %d %Y", "1284101485")

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: argument must be 9-item sequence, not str

Answer 1

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 2

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'
   

Answer 3

>>> 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 4

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 5

quick and dirty one liner:

'-'.join(str(x) for x in list(tuple(datetime.datetime.now().timetuple())[:6]))

'2013-5-5-1-9-43'

Answer 6

i just successfully used:

>>> type(tstamp)
pandas.tslib.Timestamp
>>> newDt = tstamp.date()
>>> type(newDt)
datetime.date