Timestamp Validator

Is this timestamp plausible?

Checks a number timestamp for the mistakes that really happen. The unit may be wrong. It may be past the 32-bit limit. It may be a stand-in value. Or the date may be far from where it should be.

Questions people ask

The things that come up about timestamp validators, answered plainly.

What is the most common timestamp bug?

A mix-up of units. Someone passes milliseconds where seconds were expected, or the other way round. Read milliseconds as seconds and you land near the year 45,000. Read seconds as milliseconds and you land in January 1970. Both are easy to spot once you know the pattern.

What does a timestamp of 0 mean?

Midnight on 1 January 1970. In practice, though, it usually means a field that was never set. So does -1. So does 2147483647. That is the largest 32-bit value, and it is often used to mean 'never expires'.

Related tools

Julian days, Excel serials, GPS time, cron expressions and format validators.

Unix Time ValidatorCheck a value before you trust it: which precision it plausibly is, what date it lands on, and whether it trips any of the usual overflow and sentinel traps.

Date ValidatorChecks that a date exists as well as parses — 31 February and 29 February in a common year both parse fine in most languages, and neither is a date.

Unix Timestamp ConverterPaste a timestamp and get the date; paste a date and get the timestamp. The precision is detected from the digit count and shown so you can override it, and a number that is not Unix time is checked against the other eleven epochs too.

Epoch Difference CalculatorTake one timestamp from another and get the gap in seconds and in plain units. You also get the same gap in each of the four common precisions.