UNIX Timestamp Visual Basic 6

December 5, 2009

Time() Function

Since I started programming in PHP, after Visual Basic, I started to rely on some of the features available with PHP. One of those was the Time() function.

Since I don't know of any function that does this in Visual basic, I made this "wrapper" function to calculate with less code.

While I know this works for Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition, I'm not sure about earlier versions of Visual Basic. Please comment with your findings.

I do not believe this works with .NET-based languages (Visual Studio 2003 through 2010).


Option Explicit

Dim DateTime As String

Private Function Time(ByVal DateTime As String)

    Time = DateDiff("s", "01/1/1970 12:00:00 AM", DateTime)

End Function

Using this function is relatively simple:


Private Sub Form_Load()

    Form1.Caption = Time(Now)

End Sub

"Now" is a Visual Basic Constant that contains a current timestamp (like this: 12/04/2009 11:57:00 AM). This will return the current timestamp as Form1's caption property.

You can also insert any (properly formatted) time into this function and get a result. You may get an error using this function if you don't call it / pass variables correctly. I didn't error-check it so you can debug it easier during development.

Proper formats:

mm/dd/yy
mm/dd/yyyy
mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss ap

Try out your specifc requirements, they may work.

Thanks for reading, please leave a comment below if you liked this article

AmathurNovember 12th, 2010 3:03 am CSTPrint: 815a2ce614da76552644

Great guns !! It works wonderfully well. Robert Thanks a Lot.

Nathaniel GibsonJanuary 31st, 2011 10:17 am CSTPrint: 815a2ce614da76552644

I modified your code so that it would not use VB6 constants and functions like the function Time which is a VB6 constant for the time of day. Thus, the resulting code is...

Private Function UNIXTime(Optional strDT As String) As Long
If Len(strDT) 0 Then strDT Now
UNIXTime DateDiff("s", "0111970 12:00:00 AM", strDT)
End Function

I also changed it so that the argument is optional and Defaults to Now like a PHP function would... I love the way those programmers and Zend think :)

Robert LernerJuly 23rd, 2011 5:42 pm CDTPrint: 815a2ce614da76552644

Thanks Nathaniel!

It's been quite some time since I've tinkered with VB, it's nice to see that some people are still interested in the language!