Question

I am getting data from an API. The date attached to each object comes in this format:

Timestamp is the date and time of an
event in UTC time. This is expressed
as a specific number of milliseconds
since the standard base “epoch” of:
January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT

I am trying to convert this into a different date format in Ruby.

CODE

objects.each do |obj|
  p "object"
  p obj.created
  p Time.at(obj.created)
end

OUTPUT

"object"
1308886130000
43446-12-14 10:33:20 +1000
"object"
1308886104000
43446-12-14 03:20:00 +1000
"object"
1308801345000
43444-04-07 03:10:00 +1000

The years are obviously incorrect. What am I doing wrong?

I am using Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.0.1

Answer 1

The Time.at function expects time since the epoch in seconds. You’re giving it milliseconds, so the calculation is way off.

Divide that timestamp by 1000.