DateTime conversion can be tricky

I wrote a small Lisp application and a JavaScript client gets some data from that application. All time stamps are returned as “Lisp” time stamps, i.e. an integer with seconds where zero equals Jan 01 1900.

In the JS client the time stamp is then converted to JS time stamps, i.e. millisconds where zero equals Jan 01 1970.

When testing the application I noticed that sometimes the displayed date is one day behind. For example in the data base I have Jan 05 1980 but in JavaScript I get a Jan 04 1980. But some other dates worked: A time stamp Jan 05 1970 was correctly converted to Jan 05 1970.

I had a look into the JavaScript code and found:

convA = function(ts) {
  tmp = new Date(ts*1000);
  tmp.setFullYear(tmp.getFullYear() - 70);
  return tmp.getTime();
}

It’s likely the developer thought: “Well, it’s millisecond instead of second. Therefore I multiply by 1,000. But then I am 70 years in the future and I have to substract 70 years and everything will be ok.”

After thinking a while I came to the conclusion: Of course not!

The developer made the assumption that there are as many leap years between 1900 and 1970 as between ts and ts+70. Obviously that assumption does not hold for all time stamps. And therefore sometimes the resulting JavaScript date is one day behind.

So a better solution would be to substract all seconds between 1900 and 1970 from ts, multiply by 1,000 and treat this as a JavaScript time stamp. Perhaps best would be to do the conversion in the Lisp process and only deliver a JavaScript-like time stamp.