timestamp

Function

Description

Convert from different types to a time.Time.

This is one of the most important functions in VQL. We need to convert timestamps very frequently from various representations. Most commonly from strings, Unix epoch times etc.

This function is pretty smart and tries to do the right thing most of the time automatically. For example, you can provide the epoch parameter as an integer representing seconds since the epoch, milliseconds or microseconds since the epoch.

SELECT timestamp(epoch=1630414425) AS Time1,
       timestamp(epoch=1630414425000) AS Time2,
       timestamp(epoch=1630414425000000) AS Time3,
FROM scope()

You can also provide a string, and timestamp() will try to parse it by guessing what it represents. For example

SELECT timestamp(string='March 3 2019'),
       timestamp(string='07/25/2019 5pm')
FROM scope()

For more control over the parsing of strings, use the format parameter to specify a template which will be used to parse the timestamp.

The format template uses a constant time as an example of how the time is layed out. It represents a template for a timestamp that must use the following date constants

• Year: “2006” “06”
• Month: “Jan” “January”
• Textual day of the week: “Mon” “Monday”
• Numeric day of the month: “2” “_2” “02”
• Numeric day of the year: “__2” “002”
• Hour: “15” “3” “03” (PM or AM)
• Minute: “4” “04”
• Second: “5” “05”
• AM/PM mark: “PM”
• “-0700” ±hhmm
• “-07:00” ±hh:mm
• “-07” ±hh

SELECT timestamp(string="8/30/2021 6:01:28 PM",
                 format="1/2/2006 3:04:05 PM")