Parsing unix time in C#

Simplest way is probably to use something like:

private static readonly DateTime Epoch = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 
                                                      DateTimeKind.Utc);

...
public static DateTime UnixTimeToDateTime(string text)
{
    double seconds = double.Parse(text, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
    return Epoch.AddSeconds(seconds);
}

Three things to note:

  • If your strings are definitely of the form "x.y" rather than "x,y" you should use the invariant culture as shown above, to make sure that "." is parsed as a decimal point
  • You should specify UTC in the DateTime constructor to make sure it doesn't think it's a local time.
  • If you're using .NET 3.5 or higher, you might want to consider using DateTimeOffset instead of DateTime.

This is a very common thing people in C# do, yet there is no library for that.

I created this mini library https://gist.github.com/1095252 to make my life (I hope yours too) easier.


// This is an example of a UNIX timestamp for the date/time 11-04-2005 09:25.
double timestamp = 1113211532;

// First make a System.DateTime equivalent to the UNIX Epoch.
System.DateTime dateTime = new System.DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0);

// Add the number of seconds in UNIX timestamp to be converted.
dateTime = dateTime.AddSeconds(timestamp);

// The dateTime now contains the right date/time so to format the string,
// use the standard formatting methods of the DateTime object.
string printDate = dateTime.ToShortDateString() +" "+ dateTime.ToShortTimeString();

// Print the date and time
System.Console.WriteLine(printDate);

Surce: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/timestamp.aspx