Reading Unix Timestamps

I'm a PHP veteran, but recently took up ColdFusion, so I'm sort of new to it. What I need to do is convert a Unix timestamp into a human-readable form. I know in PHP it's date("<format>", $timestamp), but can ColdFusion format a timestamp?

I searched the forums already, but found nothing. If I missed a thread that already discusses this, my apologies.

Check out the CF documentation, specifically the function reference. Will something like dateFormat() or timeFormat() work in this case?

Yeah, the CF documentation is my best friend and there's no simple function like in PHP (that I'm aware of). However, after several hours of playing, I have created a function that works. I have a habit of doing things the hard way, so if there's a better way, let me know:

<cfscript>
function ConvertUnixTimestamp(input) {
return DateConvert("utc2Local", Replace(Replace(DateAdd("s", input, "January 1 1970 00:00:00"), "{ts '", ""), "'}", ""));
}
</cfscript>

What does a UNIX timestamp look like? It seems bizarre to me that none of the built-in date functions will format it?

Does this UDF from cflib.org do the trick?

http://www.cflib.org/udf.cfm?ID=654

A Unix timestamp is the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Unix epoch (midnight of January 1st, 1970). It usually looks like this: 1070152114.

The UDF I wrote is the same thing, expect it strips off the preceeding "{ts '" and ending "'}" and converts the time to local time (as the timestamp is always in UTC).

I suppose the UDF I wrote is the answer to my question. Thanx for the help!

Matthew, I tried your conversion function and it worked great, I just had to throw a dateFormat() around it's output to make it look how I wanted. However, I just made up a UNIX timestamp to try it with because I'm in a non-Unix environment.

I'm going to save this function in case I ever get back to Unix-land and am using CF.

wdn2k

Yep, I used a dateFormat() also for the final format, but the UDF returns what I needed. I'm not using Unix, but I use this function for UNIX_TIMESTAMP values from a MySQL database.

Glad you can use it!

you could also just ask mysql to return the converted format

makes your CF code a lot cleaner

the more you do in the database, the better

I agree that having the DB take some of the load is a good idea, but sometimes I want the date as an int because it makes date math very simple.

wdn2k

I agree, and I tried using CAST(), which worked. But the UDF I wrote makes the returned string a little cleaner and easier to use, plus, hopefully someone can use it...

Just a reminder that when you encounter something like this, there's a very good chance someone else has already done it and posted a function at CFLib.org.

yes, i understand, you store it in the mysql table as an integer

but you can see it either way:i wasn't suggesting that you store it formatted!!

of course, if you're on some other database instead of mysql, and it doesn't have a from_unixtime function, then...