twitter-snowflake-to-date

Convert a tweet ID snowflake to a JavaScript Date object

Since November 2010, Twitter use the snowflake ID system to guarantee identifier unicity.

It is composed with 42 bits of milliseconds timestamp, and 22 other bits of machine/worker identifiers and an internal counter.

With this package, you can simply extract the date contained in those type of IDs.

Getting started

Install it using npm.

npm i twitter-snowflake-to-date

Usage

One function is exported. You can import it with its name or with default import.

import twitterSnowflakeToDate from 'twitter-snowflake-to-date';
// OR with named import //
import { twitterSnowflakeToDate } from 'twitter-snowflake-to-date';
// OR with require //
const { twitterSnowflakeToDate } = require('twitter-snowflake-to-date');
 
const tweet_id_str = "1233161576649121792";
 
const tweet_date = twitterSnowflakeToDate(tweet_id_str); // Date(2020-02-27T22:46:45.564Z)

Note: Twitter uses snowflakes IDs since November 2010 only. Every given tweet ID that is not a snowflake will return Date(2010-10-31T12:00:00.000Z).

You can easily check if tweet ID is a snowflake by checking its length. A length > 13 ensure you have a snowflake ID.