Date and time conversions

[markfree]

Whenever I get a timestamp value like "yyyymmddhhMMss", if necessary, I convert it to "unixtime" with a JavaScript preprocessing step.

This script is usually sufficient:

// checks if the input value is null
if (isNaN(Date.parse(value))) { return 0; }

// break the timestamp string into date and time values
var year = parseInt(value.substring(0, 4), 10);
var month = parseInt(value.substring(4, 6), 10) - 1;
var day = parseInt(value.substring(6, 8), 10);
var hour = parseInt(value.substring(8, 10), 10);
var minute = parseInt(value.substring(10, 12), 10);
var second = parseInt(value.substring(12, 14), 10);

// creates a new date and time object and converts it to unixtime
var dateTime = new Date(year, month, day, hour, minute, second);
var unixtime = dateTime.getTime() / 1000;
return unixtime;

I was wondering if anyone has a better way to do this kind of conversion?.

[eric_at_2037]

Hello,

Have you try fmttime macro function?

Other way, more reliable (works fine with ISO 8601 and ISO_8601 with timezone):

// checks if the input value is null
if (isNaN(Date.parse(value))) { return 0; }

// JavaScript Date function
var timestamp = new Date(value).getTime()
return timestamp;

[markfree]

Hey, thanks. I appreciate your feedback.
In my previous example, the input value is a string, and it's not a macro, so I can't use the "fmttime" function.

The "Date()" function accepts strings as input, but only in date-time string format. It usually requires the ECMAScript format as input and support for other formats is not guaranteed. Implementations are allowed to support other date formats, but I believe the Ducktape implementation used on Zabbix does not support the string I suggested earlier.

Therefore, using your suggested script results in an error.