Converting unix timestamp to polars datetime

Computers are good at recording timestamps, but they do it in Unix time. Sadly, humans aren’t great at interpreting Unix time.

Below is a dataframe of YouTube comments where users posted what they considered to be the best opening line in literature.

shape: (4, 3)

Commment	User	Unix_Time
str	str	f64
"In my younger and more vulnera…	"@fscott"	1698592675.131816
"Call me Ishmael."	"@hmelville"	1680453910.612181
"It was the best of times, it w…	"@cdickens"	1701274456.134241
"It is a truth universally ackn…	"@jausten"	1701274277.673785

From Unix time to normal datetime

Unless you’re familiar with interpreting Unix timestamps, it’s difficult to tell when each comment was posted. Fortunately, Polars makes it easy to convert these timestamps into a human-readable format. Here’s how to do it.

(df
 .with_columns(Datetime=pl.from_epoch('Unix_Time'))
 )

shape: (4, 4)

Commment	User	Unix_Time	Datetime
str	str	f64	datetime[μs]
"In my younger and more vulnera…	"@fscott"	1.6986e9	2023-10-29 15:17:55
"Call me Ishmael."	"@hmelville"	1.6805e9	2023-04-02 16:45:10
"It was the best of times, it w…	"@cdickens"	1.7013e9	2023-11-29 16:14:16
"It is a truth universally ackn…	"@jausten"	1.7013e9	2023-11-29 16:11:17

Now you can see the exact date, hour, and even minute each comment was posted.

Learn even more ways to analyze data in my Polars course.