topic Re: Convert Zulu time to epoch in Splunk Search

Convert Zulu time to epoch

landzaat — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:24:40 GMT

Some Windows events report date/time in zulu format: “‎2013‎-‎03‎-‎27T21:00:32.950000000Z”. I want to convert to epoch. Tried “

eval pt1=strptime(Previous_Time,"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%9NZ")

and some variants. Unfortunately no result. I am obviously overlooking something. Who knows what?

Re: Convert Zulu time to epoch

martin_mueller — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:37:02 GMT

This works for me:

eval time = strptime("2013-03-27T21:00:32.950000000Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%9NZ")

...but only if I type the date in myself. If I copy your date string it fails because the dashes in your date string aren't dashes. Using your copied date string, I need to do this to make it work:

eval time = strptime(replace("2013‎-‎03‎-‎27T21:00:32.950000000Z", "\D", ""), "%Y%m%d%H%M%S%9N")

Re: Convert Zulu time to epoch

landzaat — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:31:58 GMT

Thanks. Never thought strings could be not what they look like. Valuable hint for all coming troubleshoots.

Re: Convert Zulu time to epoch

martin_mueller — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:42:36 GMT

I've copied your string into my Notepad++ and it comes out as ?-? for the dashes when trying to interpret them as ANSI, gibberish when trying to interpret them as UTF-8

Re: Convert Zulu time to epoch

Aether — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 21:08:16 GMT

This solution doesn't appear to account for timezone, which Splunk automatically adjusts for. By adding a % before the Z, Splunk will not perform this adjustment, which unless you have your timezone set as GMT you dont want (this assumes its ACTUALLY zulu time).

Assuming you dont need to do the hyphen replacement, you can also shorthand the format to "%FT%T.%5N%Z"

The solution thus becomes:
eval time = strptime("2013-03-27T21:00:32.950000000Z", "%FT%T.%5N%Z")

or
eval time = strptime("2013-03-27T21:00:32.950000000Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%9N%Z")

Re: Convert Zulu time to epoch

Aether — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 21:10:39 GMT

Assuming you dont need to do the hyphen replacement, you can also shorthand the format to "%FT%T.%5N%Z"

The solution thus becomes:
eval time = strptime("2013-03-27T21:00:32.950000000Z", "%FT%T.%5N%Z")

or
eval time = strptime("2013-03-27T21:00:32.950000000Z", "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%9N%Z")