Unix Timestamp
Convert between Unix epoch seconds and ISO/RFC datetime formats (UTC).
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What is a Unix timestamp?
A Unix timestamp (epoch time) is the number of seconds elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 (the Unix epoch). It's a universal, timezone-free way to represent a specific moment in time. The current timestamp is always increasing and is the same for all systems worldwide at any given instant.
Why do developers use Unix timestamps instead of date strings?
Timestamps are unambiguous — no timezone confusion, no locale-specific date formats, and trivially sortable as integers. They're ideal for databases, API responses, log files, and any system that needs to compare or sort times. Date strings like '01/02/03' are ambiguous across locales; a timestamp like 1704067200 always means the same instant.
What is the Year 2038 problem?
Systems that store Unix timestamps as a 32-bit signed integer can only represent dates up to 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038 (231 − 1 = 2,147,483,647 seconds). After that, the value overflows to a large negative number. Modern systems use 64-bit integers, which can represent dates billions of years in the future.
How do I convert a timestamp in JavaScript?
new Date(timestamp * 1000) — JavaScript uses milliseconds, so multiply by 1000. To get the current timestamp: Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000). In Python: import time; time.time() for the current timestamp, and datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, tz=timezone.utc) to convert.