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Chris Bongers
Chris Bongers

Posted on • Originally published at daily-dev-tips.com

Vanilla JavaScript get current timestamp

Today I needed to get a timestamp to include in a unique file that I'm generating with Node.js.

It's one of these things that after 17 years, I still google to this day... Call me stupid or just ignorant in not saving it in my brain.

Getting a Timestamp in JavaScript

Date.now();
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Wow, That was the one thing I can't get in my head?!
Yes. There are other ways of doing it, so here are some alternatives that do the same:

new Date().getTime();
new Date().valueOf();
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All three methods will get a millisecond timestamp; we can convert it to seconds by doing so:

Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000);
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Feel free to have a look and play on this Codepen.

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Top comments (2)

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abdfnx profile image
abdfn

finally, I found a good post about get current timestamp in Vanilla js 👍

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Chris Bongers

You're welcome, be aware they might not last forever 🤟