Any contains an arbitrary serialized protocol buffer message along with a URL that describes the type of the serialized message.

Protobuf library provides support to pack/unpack Any values in the form of utility functions or additional generated methods of the Any type.

Example 1: Pack and unpack a message in C++.

Foo foo = ...;
Any any;
any.PackFrom(foo);
...
if (any.UnpackTo(&foo)) {
  ...
}

Example 2: Pack and unpack a message in Java.

Foo foo = ...;
Any any = Any.pack(foo);
...
if (any.is(Foo.class)) {
  foo = any.unpack(Foo.class);
}

Example 3: Pack and unpack a message in Python.

foo = Foo(...)
any = Any()
any.Pack(foo)
...
if any.Is(Foo.DESCRIPTOR):
  any.Unpack(foo)
  ...

Example 4: Pack and unpack a message in Go

 foo := &pb.Foo{...}
 any, err := ptypes.MarshalAny(foo)
 ...
 foo := &pb.Foo{}
 if err := ptypes.UnmarshalAny(any, foo); err != nil {
   ...
 }

The pack methods provided by protobuf library will by default use 'type.googleapis.com/full.type.name' as the type URL and the unpack methods only use the fully qualified type name after the last '/' in the type URL, for example "foo.bar.com/x/y.z" will yield type name "y.z".

JSON

The JSON representation of an Any value uses the regular representation of the deserialized, embedded message, with an additional field @type which contains the type URL. Example:

package google.profile;
message Person {
  string first_name = 1;
  string last_name = 2;
}

{
  "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.profile.Person",
  "firstName": <string>,
  "lastName": <string>
}

If the embedded message type is well-known and has a custom JSON representation, that representation will be embedded adding a field value which holds the custom JSON in addition to the @type field. Example (for message google.protobuf.Duration):

{
  "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.protobuf.Duration",
  "value": "1.212s"
}

A Timestamp represents a point in time independent of any time zone or local calendar, encoded as a count of seconds and fractions of seconds at nanosecond resolution. The count is relative to an epoch at UTC midnight on January 1, 1970, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar which extends the Gregorian calendar backwards to year one.

All minutes are 60 seconds long. Leap seconds are "smeared" so that no leap second table is needed for interpretation, using a 24-hour linear smear.

The range is from 0001-01-01T00:00:00Z to 9999-12-31T23:59:59.999999999Z. By restricting to that range, we ensure that we can convert to and from RFC 3339 date strings.

Examples

Example 1: Compute Timestamp from POSIX time().

Timestamp timestamp;
timestamp.set_seconds(time(NULL));
timestamp.set_nanos(0);

Example 2: Compute Timestamp from POSIX gettimeofday().

struct timeval tv;
gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);

Timestamp timestamp;
timestamp.set_seconds(tv.tv_sec);
timestamp.set_nanos(tv.tv_usec * 1000);

Example 3: Compute Timestamp from Win32 GetSystemTimeAsFileTime().

FILETIME ft;
GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(&ft);
UINT64 ticks = (((UINT64)ft.dwHighDateTime) << 32) | ft.dwLowDateTime;

// A Windows tick is 100 nanoseconds. Windows epoch 1601-01-01T00:00:00Z
// is 11644473600 seconds before Unix epoch 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z.
Timestamp timestamp;
timestamp.set_seconds((INT64) ((ticks / 10000000) - 11644473600LL));
timestamp.set_nanos((INT32) ((ticks % 10000000) * 100));

Example 4: Compute Timestamp from Java System.currentTimeMillis().

long millis = System.currentTimeMillis();

Timestamp timestamp = Timestamp.newBuilder().setSeconds(millis / 1000)
    .setNanos((int) ((millis % 1000) * 1000000)).build();

Example 5: Compute Timestamp from current time in Python.

timestamp = Timestamp()
timestamp.GetCurrentTime()

JSON Mapping

In JSON format, the Timestamp type is encoded as a string in the RFC 3339 format. That is, the format is "{year}-{month}-{day}T{hour}:{min}:{sec}[.{frac_sec}]Z" where {year} is always expressed using four digits while {month}, {day}, {hour}, {min}, and {sec} are zero-padded to two digits each. The fractional seconds, which can go up to 9 digits (i.e. up to 1 nanosecond resolution), are optional. The "Z" suffix indicates the timezone ("UTC"); the timezone is required. A proto3 JSON serializer should always use UTC (as indicated by "Z") when printing the Timestamp type and a proto3 JSON parser should be able to accept both UTC and other timezones (as indicated by an offset).

For example, "2017-01-15T01:30:15.01Z" encodes 15.01 seconds past 01:30 UTC on January 15, 2017.

In JavaScript, one can convert a Date object to this format using the standard toISOString() method. In Python, a standard datetime.datetime object can be converted to this format using strftime with the time format spec '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%fZ'. Likewise, in Java, one can use the Joda Time's ISODateTimeFormat.dateTime() to obtain a formatter capable of generating timestamps in this format.