Matplotlib Tutorial 11 - handling unix time

Key Takeaways

what is going on everybody Welcome to the 11th tutorial in our map plot lib tutorial video series here what we're going to be talking about in this video is handling for Unix time so there are all kinds of ways that you might get date stamps and all that we spend a lot of time on the conversion there um but because there's so many I can't just show like every version of a date stamp but I do think it's important to at least show also how to convert from a Unix Tim stamp to the matap plot lib kind of format so uh coming over to our Yahoo finance API like I was saying before if you use a term like in these large numbers you know you're going to get these like kind of date stamp but if like let's say we do 10d for 10 days uh you'll see that things have changed significantly and now no longer do we have this you know year month day situation we've got these numbers like this is like 1.4 billion what's that well these are Unix timestamps so again Unix time is just the number of seconds after January 1st 1970 so now we have to convert that to a date time that is acceptable for matplot lib so the way that we're going to do that is we're going to just use another little simple function it'll actually be a little easier than the previous one we wrote because there's some handling for it already Unix timestamps like I was saying before are really popular so it's really popular with computers so people have handled Unix timestamps for a long time so come coming over here uh to our gra or our uh file what we want to do now is uh at the top let's go ahead and import uh date time as DT generally you import date time as DT and then sometimes people will import date time. dat time as date time okay so again this is just a standard that people do if they import the main module it's. DT so now what we're going to do is let's um thinking I still have this up so let's pull up um a command prompt here and open python you can do this wherever you want or you can just watch you don't have to follow along if you don't want to but feel free to if you want so uh first let's import uh date time asdt we're also going to need to import uh time now let's say first of all if you're not familiar you can print you know time.time and that gives you a Unix time okay so this is the current Unix time so let's say um our example time equals time.time so we can print example now and there you go you've got your time now what we want to do is let's go let's print dt. dat time. from amp example okay so we print that out and what we get is a is a legible time stamp okay so 2015 the uh month is July day 8 or 8th so July 8th 2015 and then this is in you know military time so 2 22 23 and then you know milliseconds basically okay so then we want to convert that date and the way that we're going to do that is we're going to convert it to numpy time so date converion we would say is equal to np. Vector oh we don't have nump import so let's import numpy and we would say dates com equals mp. vectorize dt. dat time. from timestamp I thought we imported oh we just imported numpy we didn't say as NP so I'll just call I'll just do numpy datom so then we could use date com and we can convert a date stamp like this you know to to a date time so we're going to take this code um and we're going to come over here and we need to bring in Let's see we don't well we don't need time because that was just for an example uh so date time DT this should be all we need actually so we'll come down uh here where we've pulled the date here and instead of converting we're actually not going to convert anything so um well we could well we could add a converter if we wanted but yeah we're not going to do that so we'll just do this uh um and we'll just convert this as a list after the fact so we'll come down here and then what we would say is and in fact let me just uh let's take this line just cuz I want to save it for later copy it paste and then highlight the whole line and then alt three to comment it out because we're going to go back to using this data but I do just like I said I want to show you guys how to convert Unix time just in case you need it so then delete all the way up so we'll use this one for now but soon we'll return back to our old uh format so here what we need to do now is we need to convert the date uh the date time so we use date com for date converter and that's going to be equal to do we have numpy yes so date con equals NP dot uh vectorize and we vectorize based on the dt. DAT time.time stamp or actually from time stamp so from time stamp from time stamp Okay so so now we're going to say uh date equals date com uh on the date cool so that should do it so now instead of using this 10 year range let's do a 10 instead of y 10 D which we know gives us Unix time instead and we will run that I think we're all set let's run it see what happens that worked out cool okay so what we have here are the days and and and it probably looks kind of funny to you because they're connected but these are basically you know this is where the stock market was open I mean this is intraday data here so we can zoom in this is like one day of data okay so stock market open stock market close and then they're just basically connect this is a close of the market open trade close trade close trade close trade close Okay so that's what's going on here uh but anyway long story short it worked so that's how you can convert Unix timestamps to matplot lib dates that's all I'm going to say on them I'm going to return back to the original 10 years information uh in the next tutorial and we're going to get rid of this information here but for those of you who want to do intraday data go for it uh pretty soon we're going to get off of um so a lot of people will be like all I want to get rid of these nasty lines well pretty soon we're going to be doing Candlestick graphs so there won't be this nasty line connecting them so keep that in mind uh but anyway I did just want to show how you could convert from Unix time to dates time because it's pretty important to know how to do it anyways so that's it for this tutorial if you have any questions or comments uh regarding this tutorial please feel free to leave them below otherwise as always thanks for watching thanks for all the support and subscriptions and until the next video