Getting UTC UNIX timestamp in Lua

datetime time lua timestamp strftime
Azsgy picture Azsgy · May 8, 2017 · Viewed 18.4k times · Source

An API returns a timestamp as UNIX timestamp at UTC and I would like to know if this timestamp was more than x seconds ago. As expected, this works fine with os.time() - x > timestamp in UTC, but blows up in other timezones.

Unfortunately I can't find a good way solve this in lua.

os.date helpfully has the ! prefix (e.g. os.date("!%H:%M:%S")) to return time at UTC, but it seems that despite the documentation stating it supports all strftime options, this does not support the %s option. I have heard people mention that this is caused by Lua compile time options for a similar issue, but changing these is not possible as the interpreter is provided by the user.

Answer

Joe picture Joe · May 8, 2017

You can use

os.time(os.date("!*t"))

to get the current UNIX epoch.

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