Convert date and time stamps from Epoch

[ethman42]

I would love to have a feature that would let me convert epoch timestamps to human-readable. Any thoughts on getting this working.

[jpmckinney]

csvkit offers --date-format and --datetime-format for parsing dates/times, but apparently Python's strptime doesn't support %s (which in other languages allows the parsing of timestamps). So, we'll have to pursue a special case.

[jpmckinney]

No other interest expressed since 2017, and no easy solution for this feature, so closing.

[tb582]

re-opening this, wondering if any python or other advancements make this more supportable?

[jpmckinney]

Still nothing in Python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#strftime-and-strptime-format-codes

This feature would require new logic to use date.fromtimestamp, but it's not a simple fix like %s would have been.

[damonmcminn]

It's possible to kludge it with GNU Awk strftime, assuming you manually prepend headers (to avoid the header being converted to a datetime) eg:

Given input.csv of:

a,b,c,d
foo,bar,1674642543,baz
spam,eggs,1674645576,ham

the following can be used:

tail -n+2 input.csv |
  awk -F, '{ print $1 "," $2 "," strftime("%c",$3) "," $4 }' |
  sed -e "1i $(head -n1 input.csv)" |
  csvlook

where:

• tail -n+2 input.csv strips the headers
• awk -F, '{ print $1 "," $2 "," strftime("%c",$3) "," $4 }' transforms the timestamp
• sed -e "1i $(head -n1 input.csv)" prepends the headers

resulting in:

| a    | b    | c                            | d   |
| ---- | ---- | ---------------------------- | --- |
| foo  | bar  | Wed 25 Jan 2023 10:29:03 GMT | baz |
| spam | eggs | Wed 25 Jan 2023 11:19:36 GMT | ham |