Question

This is a very simple question.

Some dates and timestamps are generated in my database.

How is this mdate build up so I can see what date and time is stored?

1st 1259575339 2nd 1261296844

I couldn’t find a converter for this.

I have read that it’s the the amount of seconds since 01-01-1970, is this correct?

Answer 1

Yes, it’s the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 (see Unix Time on wikipedia, for more info).

In PHP, you have the date() function to convert timestamps to dates as strings ; for example, this portion of code :

echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', 1259575339) . '<br />';
echo date('Y-m-d H:i:s', 1261296844) . '<br />';

Will get you, in a browser :

2009-11-30 11:02:19
2009-12-20 09:14:04

In MySQL (if that’s your DB engine), you can use the FROM_UNIXTIME function to convert those to dates :

mysql> select FROM_UNIXTIME(1259575339);
+---------------------------+
| FROM_UNIXTIME(1259575339) |
+---------------------------+
| 2009-11-30 11:02:19       |
+---------------------------+
1 row in set (0,07 sec)

mysql> select FROM_UNIXTIME(1261296844);
+---------------------------+
| FROM_UNIXTIME(1261296844) |
+---------------------------+
| 2009-12-20 09:14:04       |
+---------------------------+
1 row in set (0,00 sec)