Support of conversion of millisecond Unix time to Refine datetime

[tfmorris]

Original author: to...@benmoshe.com (September 15, 2012 11:52:15)

It would be nice to have a function such as FORMAT_UTC_USEC to convert Unix time ( which is a number) to a Datatime format, and to extract only year/month/day

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/issues/detail?id=609

[tfmorris]

From tfmorris on September 18, 2012 15:31:52:
Can you provide a reference for the definition of this function?

Since we already provide a variety of date formatting functions, I'm guessing that what you really need is to be able to convert from a microsecond Unix time (ie Unix time multiplied by 1,000,000) to a Refine DateTime data type. From there you would be able to use any of the standard date functions.

[tfmorris]

From to...@benmoshe.com on September 18, 2012 19:53:24:
Yes, it is very common to get the timestamp in microsecond unix time, a google example can be seen at rbig query functions https://developers.google.com/bigquery/docs/query-reference#timestampfunctions, but there are many other places you use it...
Axtuwlly, I wanted to use refine as part of automatic pre processing of data I am getting, and was wondering on size of input, and do it all in thbwckgrounf before loading csv to big query...

[magdmartin]

convert-unix-time offer an API that you can call using the add column by fetching URL feature in OpenRefine.

[iosonosempreio]

Hey, for me those API worked fine. The steps to get the readable date are the followings:

• select the column containing the unix date, then add a new column by fetching url using this code:

'http://www.convert-unix-time.com/api?timestamp='+ substring(value, 0, 10)+'&timezone=Rome&returnType=json'

• then transform the new column with this:

value.parseJson().utcDate

Note that I took the utcDate since I didn't need any timezone conversion for my date. If you need it, change the &timezone=Rome in the first code with the one you like. After you've fetched the urls, transform with this new one:

value.parseJson().localDate

That's it!

[magdmartin]

Thanks for sharing!