Convert a Unix timestamp to time in JavaScript

Question

I am storing time in a MySQL database as a Unix timestamp and that gets sent to some JavaScript code. How would I get just the time out of it?

For example, in HH/MM/SS format.

Solution 1

let unix_timestamp = 1549312452
// Create a new JavaScript Date object based on the timestamp
// multiplied by 1000 so that the argument is in milliseconds, not seconds.
var date = new Date(unix_timestamp * 1000);
// Hours part from the timestamp
var hours = date.getHours();
// Minutes part from the timestamp
var minutes = "0" + date.getMinutes();
// Seconds part from the timestamp
var seconds = "0" + date.getSeconds();

// Will display time in 10:30:23 format
var formattedTime = hours + ':' + minutes.substr(-2) + ':' + seconds.substr(-2);

console.log(formattedTime);

For more information regarding the Date object, please refer to MDN or the ECMAScript 5 specification.

Solution 2

function timeConverter(UNIX_timestamp){
  var a = new Date(UNIX_timestamp * 1000);
  var months = ['Jan','Feb','Mar','Apr','May','Jun','Jul','Aug','Sep','Oct','Nov','Dec'];
  var year = a.getFullYear();
  var month = months[a.getMonth()];
  var date = a.getDate();
  var hour = a.getHours();
  var min = a.getMinutes();
  var sec = a.getSeconds();
  var time = date + ' ' + month + ' ' + year + ' ' + hour + ':' + min + ':' + sec ;
  return time;
}
console.log(timeConverter(0));

Solution 3

JavaScript works in milliseconds, so you'll first have to convert the UNIX timestamp from seconds to milliseconds.

var date = new Date(UNIX_Timestamp * 1000);
// Manipulate JavaScript Date object here...

Solution 4

Use:

var s = new Date(1504095567183).toLocaleDateString("en-US")
console.log(s)
// expected output "8/30/2017"  

and for time:

var s = new Date(1504095567183).toLocaleTimeString("en-US")
console.log(s)
// expected output "3:19:27 PM"

see Date.prototype.toLocaleDateString()

Solution 5

Modern Solution (for 2020)

In the new world, we should be moving towards the standard Intl JavaScript object, that has a handy DateTimeFormat constructor with .format() method:

function format_time(s) {
  const dtFormat = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-GB', {
    timeStyle: 'medium',
    timeZone: 'UTC'
  });
  
  return dtFormat.format(new Date(s * 1e3));
}

console.log( format_time(12345) );  // "03:25:45"

---

Eternal Solution

But to be 100% compatible with all legacy JavaScript engines, here is the shortest one-liner solution to format seconds as hh:mm:ss:

function format_time(s) {
  return new Date(s * 1e3).toISOString().slice(-13, -5);
}

console.log( format_time(12345) );  // "03:25:45"

Method Date.prototype.toISOString() returns time in simplified extended ISO 8601 format, which is always 24 or 27 characters long (i.e. YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ or ±YYYYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ respectively). The timezone is always zero UTC offset.

This solution does not require any third-party libraries and is supported in all browsers and JavaScript engines.

View more solutions

Comments

[ankr]

Just multiply by 1000 since JS timestamps are in milliseconds and PHP delivers in seconds.

[Kevin Lemaire]

Here is a very useful link with different date format: timestamp.online/article/… Combine with the multiplication by 1000 and it gets the job done!

[Hidayt Rahman]

See this how I have achieved: stackoverflow.com/a/64089456/2927228

[Sebastian Simon]

If you have a string in a different date format, see Parsing a string to a date in JavaScript.

[nickf]

also you could save yourself a couple of processor ticks by avoiding the need for the large multiplication by just appending three 0s: echo "var date = new Date(" . $timestamp . "000);\n";

[Alnitak]

@nickf multiplications are trivial on modern CPUs - the string concatenation will require a lot more work!

[shomrat]

for HH/MM/SS just use last three variables and this is time will be in your local time but if you want to get the UTC time just use the getUTC methods. Here's the code.

[Admin]

Concatenation should consist of reading memory and writing memory..how could someone design something that takes something simple such as appending and make it more complicated than multiplaction...ask a child to concatenate and they can..multiplicaion is more difficult...plus memory is laid out to work linearly anyawyas...Can someone provide a reference to the @nickf comment?

[Fireblaze]

Actually it will display time in '10:2:2' format, since it does not add an extra 0 before values below 10.

[Bachi]

for most web solutions, this is the most correct answer, since it uses the client's locale, e.g. 24h vs. 12h am/pm format. For a time string, you would then use: date.toLocaleTimeString()

[trejder]

@Fireblaze Then let's get it fixed, shall we? :] See my answer at the bottom.

[trejder]

I don't think you need an extra, separate function, to get a number with trailing zero, whenever this is necessary -- see my answer at the bottom.

[SexyBeast]

Any way we can extract the day and date and time, like 21 August, 12:11:23 as well?

[Brad Koch]

@Cupidvogel , sure, check the reference the OP provided, or any of the other answers, which cover month and date as well.

[Brilliand]

@user656925 - Multiplication involves numbers, concatenation involves strings. Computers handle numbers far more efficiently than strings. When string concatenation is done, there's a lot of memory management going on in the background. (However, if you're already doing a string concatenation anyway, then including a few extra characters in one of the strings might actually be less costly on average than the one processor op it takes to multiply two numbers together.)

[walv]

@trejder, in your example, you DUPLICATE the logic while with extra function you have it in one place. Also you trigger date functon (e.g. getHours()) always two times while here - it is one time call. You can never know how heavy is some library function to be re-executed (however i do believe it is light for dates).

[Kevin Dice]

Just a minor thing about concatenation: Using .join() is a lot more efficient. However, this this suggests that concatination is becoming more efficient in some cases.

[Aviram Netanel]

I get "Object ... has no method 'toISOString'"

[user1985189]

I used this solution but tweaked it so that minutes and seconds would show up as :03 or :09 instead of :3 or :9, like so: var min = a.getMinutes() < 10 ? '0' + a.getMinutes() : a.getMinutes(); var sec = a.getSeconds() < 10 ? '0' + a.getSeconds() : a.getSeconds();

[jcampbell1]

Bug: getMonth() returns a month number between 0 and 11, thus a.getMonth() - 1 is wrong.

[martin]

another advantage of moment.js (or similar libs) would be their support of relative time, for messages like "6 hours ago".

[NetOperator Wibby]

In your console.log examples, I was confused about the format due to the /, but it helped me a lot.

[Peter Mortensen]

Regarding "the non-culturally imperialistic way": Don't you mean "the non-culturally and non-imperialistic way"?

[RobertoNovelo]

This answer is always helpful

[Stephen S.]

Unfortunately this method is not compatible with Safari.

[Alston]

@Alnitak What suggests that string concatenation takes more memory than number computation?

[Alnitak]

@Stallman number computation is the most fundamental thing that computers do, and they're extremely efficient at it, both in memory and runtime. Brilliand's comment above is relevant, although IMHO the very final part of his comment is completely bogus.

[Alston]

@Brilliand What suggests that string concatenation takes more memory than number computation? I would like to know more about it., is that the property of JS or for all kind of language?

[Brilliand]

@Stallman It's true of all languages (or nearly all, in theory an exotic language could be created that isn't like this - but all the common ones are). A string is stored internally as a pointer to a block of memory where the contents of the string are stored. The pointer itself uses the same amount of memory as most numbers do on the same system, and the memory to store the actual strings is in addition to that. Then when you concatenate the strings, you're most often creating a brand-new string with the combined contents of both strings.

[Alston]

@Brilliand Here is my understandings: You mean that a string may occupies lots of memory since it consists of lots of chars but the number only takes a little memory. Take C for instance, if the system is 64 OS based, the integer takes 4 bytes; nevertheless the strings may take much more than that.(1*N) And in the process of concatenation, the OS requires to allocate additional memory to accommodate the concatenated strings.

[Kemat Rochi]

Do you know how to do it backwards, like converting this format DD-MM-YYYY HH:mm:ss to something like this 1439198499 ??

[Peter T.]

Hi Kemat, You can do it via this statement moment('2009-07-15 00:00:00').unix()

[codec]

My timestamp is in UTC format. Any difference I need to make here for that? How can I have am/pm?

[codec]

My timestamp is in UTC format. Any difference I need to make here for that? How can I have am/pm?

[codec]

My timestamp is in UTC format. Any change I need to make here for that? How can I have am/pm?

[codec]

My timestamp is in UTC format. Any change I need to make here for that? How can I have am/pm?

[VisioN]

It will not happen with toTimeString method. Check here: stackoverflow.com/a/35890537/1249581.

[Steve Chamaillard]

I'm pasting your function in Chrome's console :/ Even in your fiddle it's showing 01:02:00 for me ! Tried on Firefox, same results. Very strange...I'm pretty sure it's because I'm GMT+1 !

[Steve Chamaillard]

I've offered an edit for your answer that ignores any timezone, so it'll always show the right formatted value !

[VisioN]

@SteveChamaillard Thank you, Steve. You were right, toTimeString was not working well with time zones. Unfortunately your edit was rejected before I saw it. However, I'd suggest to use toISOString instead, since toGMTString is deprecated and may return different results on different platforms.

[Vlad]

Works fine. Thank you

[Peter]

I know It was good answer back in a days, but this days extending native js objects is an anti-pattern.

[Laeeq]

You can easily convert timestamp to date usign momentJS, you checkout this coderszine.com/convert-timestamp-to-date-using-javascript

[Wolfgang]

This is a command to get the date (M/D/YYYY), not the time (HH/MM/SS) as requested.

[SamGoody]

Even shorter with ES6: let time = s => new Date(s * 1e3).toISOString().slice(-13, -5)

[Robin Métral]

moment.js is waaay overkill for such a small thing to do and will affect your performance. Use native methods instead, cf. Dan Alboteanu's answer

[ibodi]

It doesn't work (anymore?) in node js format is not a function. But this apparently works: stackoverflow.com/a/34015511/7550772

[keanu_reeves]

when using this with PHP unix timestamps i get +5h than the actual time for some reason :/

[bitfiddler]

@keanu_reeves - sounds like you are in eastern US time zone and the timestamps are UTC. Try removing the .slice(0,19) and I think you will see the timezone of the result is Z (Zulu).

[camillo777]

just a note, the number "1504095567183" is unix_timestamp * 1000

[Orici]

This is not an Unix Timestamp: 1435986900000 / This is an Unix Timestamp: 1435986900

[abidinberkay]

this solution works for me but how can i take the month like Feb Mar Apr instead of number ?

[Sean]

In addition, toLocaleString includes both date and time.

[Kamil Kiełczewski]

for timestamp=1592426697 gives wrong number of hours (=442340) - can you fix it?

[Daniel]

@Alston It's really a lot more complicated than that. Strings are stored as a stack pointer to an array, the contents of which are stored on the heap (whereas integers are stored directly on the stack). That means that every call to a string also involves a dereferencing operation. Of course, computers do this quite quickly. But each of these strings is also allocated additional memory to allow for mutation, which can balloon the amount of memory required.

[lys]

Both aren't working in Safari iOS 13 using the timestamp from navigator.geolocation

[Flight Dude]

This is brilliant. Thanks!

[Curtis]

Don't need a list of month names, javascript has that, even in IE. var month = a.toLocaleDateString(undefined, {month: 'short'})

[Tony Borchert]

I don't know if it will help the discussion, but beware that if you give the Date constructor a number, it knows exactly how to interpret it. But if you give the Date constructor a string, it would have to validate it, as there are dozens of possible string date time constructs that are all equally as valid, so there would be some validation necessary while the number as an input does not require any

[NoxFly]

String.substr() is deprecated nowadays. Use slice instead, which can also cover the negative index.

[Alex78191]

@ibodi it's library

[August]

To get only date part: let str = date.toISOString().split('T')[0];

[Vasyl Gutnyk]

can you explain how does it work? what is 1e3 and why we multiple it?