topic timestamp in SAS Programming

timestamp

Lost_Gary — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:51:39 GMT

I have a data field 'TimeStamp' that I've imported via API that appears as 1.7454672E12. The information published states the field is ' Either a date with the format YYYY-MM-DD or a millisecond timestamp.'

I'd appreciate any thoughts on a SAS format that can help me understand what this value is.

Thanks.

Re: timestamp

PaigeMiller — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 19:29:28 GMT

So your timestamp is about 1.7 trillion, whereas the timestamp of today (April 28, 2025) is approx 2 billion, about 1,000 times smaller than the timestamp you show. So if your timestamp is in milliseconds, then you would divide by 1,000 to turn it into seconds, and then use a datetime format to convert it to a date.

data a;
    timestamp=datetime();
    output;
    timestamp=1.7454672E12/1000;
    output;
    format timestamp dtdate9.; /* Or use whatever datetime format you want */
run;

Re: timestamp

Quentin — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 19:05:35 GMT

Do you know what the correct date or date-time value is, which this value represents? If it is a millisecond timestamp, is it number of milliseconds since what zero point?

If it's number of milliseconds, you could convert it to number of seconds, but you need to know the zero point. If the 0 is Jan 1, 1960, then it would represent 24Apr2015 at 4:00am:

18   data a ;
19     x=1.7454672E12 ;
20     x=x/1000 ;
21     format x datetime19. ;
22     put x= ;
23   run ;

x=24APR2015:04:00:00
NOTE: The data set WORK.A has 1 observations and 1 variables.

Re: timestamp

PaigeMiller — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 19:17:19 GMT

Good point, we don't know the zero point for this information.

Minor quibble, which I was going to mention in my other post

The value 1.7454672E12 is almost definitely a truncated value, it almost definitely is not the actual time that the timestamp was taken (not a good way to transmit information) because there are only 8 significant digits. So it would represent 24Apr2015 at 4:00am, plus or minus a few hours (which I am too lazy to calculate exactly).

Re: timestamp

Tom — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 03:50:41 GMT

Unix timestamps use 1970 as the base date.

65   data test;
66     ts=1.7454672E12;
67     dt='01JAN1970:00:00'dt + ts/1000;
68     put ts=comma20./ dt=datetime26.6;
69   run;

ts=1,745,467,200,000
dt=24APR2025:04:00:00.000000