Unix Time and .NET DateTime
I’m working on a ASP.NET project where I need to interface with a MySQL database that’s populated by a PHP application. Naturally, all references to time are in Unix timestamps, and also quite naturally, .NET’s DateTime type doesn’t have any Unix-related methods. Thankfully, it’s easy enough to convert between the two.
A Unix timestamp is the amount of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970 (called the Unix Epoch). Knowing this, you can write a couple of methods to convert .NET DateTime to Unix timestamps and vice-versa. The following is a little class I wrote for my project.
public static class DateTimeUtils
{
private static DateTime _Epoch;
static DateTimeUtils()
{
_Epoch = new System.DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0);
}
public static double ToUnixTimeStamp(DateTime dateTime)
{
TimeSpan timeSpan = dateTime - _Epoch;
return Math.Floor(timeSpan.TotalSeconds);
}
public static DateTime FromUnixTimeStamp(double timestamp)
{
return _Epoch.AddSeconds(timestamp);
}
}The ToUnixTimeStamp() method returns whole seconds. So slight modifications are needed if you want a timestamp with milliseconds.
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