How to format Stripe timestamp in Coldfusion - coldfusion

Question

One of the fields I get back from a Stripe request is the created field, which contains the value "1351894331". I have tried using DateFormat() in Coldfusion to format this, but that did not work out. I imagine this is some sort of date type / timestamp that needs to be converted before DateFormatting it, but what do I need to use? What type of date format is that?
Thanks

Answer 1

That could be a number of seconds from 1970-01-01? This code:
<cfoutput>#dateAdd("s", 1351894331, createDateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0))#</cfoutput>
Outputs:
{ts '2012-11-02 21:12:11'}
Would that be around about the timestamp you'd expect?
Have you read the "Stripe" docs? If I wanted to know how something worked, my first port of call would be to RTFM. To put it appropriately, if slightly indelicately.
On a whim, I googled "what format is stripe created timestamps in" for you. The first link goes to here. The second link goes to the relevant question on strip.com's docs, which say:
Yes, all Stripe times are in UTC represented as the Unix epoch.
And just to verify the Unix Epoch date, I googled that too. And the answer is:
Unix time, [...] is [...] defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), 1 January 1970
Of course if you're meaning some other sort of "stripe", you're gonna have to elaborate.

Answer 2

That's a unix timestamp - number of seconds since 1 Jan 1970 - which is used often as a method for storing dates.
But not in CFML, where dates are handled as a floating number of days since 30-Dec-1899.
To convert from a unix timestamp to a CF date number, you need to divide by number of seconds in a day (86400), then add the number of days between the two dates.
<cfset UnixTime = 1351894331 />
<!--- days between 1-Jan-1970 and 30-Dec-1899) --->
<cfset UnixTimeOffset = 25569 />
<cfset CfTime = UnixTimeOffset + UnixTime/86400 />
You can then use the CfTime variable in any date functions and they will work as usual.

Answer 3

Stripe is a supported gateway in CFPAYMENT (a well-tested library that helps you avoid writing e-commerce plumbing code) and has helper functions for the date conversions. You can see the methods here:
https://github.com/ghidinelli/cfpayment/blob/master/api/gateway/stripe/stripe.cfc
<cffunction name="dateToUTC" output="false" access="public" returntype="any" hint="Take a date and return the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch">
<cfargument name="date" type="any" required="true" />
<cfreturn dateDiff("s", dateConvert("utc2Local", "January 1 1970 00:00"), arguments.date) />
</cffunction>
<cffunction name="UTCToDate" output="false" access="public" returntype="date" hint="Take a UTC timestamp and convert it to a ColdFusion date object">
<cfargument name="utcdate" required="true" />
<cfreturn dateAdd("s", arguments.utcDate, dateConvert("utc2Local", "January 1 1970 00:00")) />
</cffunction>