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Comment by aqfamnzc

4 years ago

As a programming noob, I'm wondering what would be the better way to pass or return a unix time value as opposed to an integer?

4 comments

aqfamnzc

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mleonhard  4 years ago

If you need to keep the timezone with it, then use an ISO8601 [0] string: "2021-11-11T15:32:35-07:00".

Otherwise, use an integer unix timestamp, the number of seconds since 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z: 1636673555. Use an unsigned 32-bit integer or a 64-bit integer to avoid the 2038 problem [1]. JSON's maximum safe integer value is a signed 53-bit integer, so if you're using HTTP JSON RPC, you'll have to check for overflow.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

  • globular-toast  4 years ago

    ISO8601 is a serialisation format. You wouldn't want to use it in internal function calls simply for performance reasons. You also wouldn't want to pass it around as just a "string" type. I think the question was asking about internal function calls. For external data interchange, ISO8601 is the only sane option and deals with all known timezone and leap second bollocks.

globular-toast  4 years ago

Depends on the language but most high-level languages have a timestamp or datetime abstraction which you should be using.