How to Add / Subtract Time in Pine Script

Representing time and date in Pine Script can be problematic, especially for not-so-experienced developers. The output format for date/time may not make a lot of sense. As an illustration, let’s try to plot the date/time on your screen using the following code.

//@version=5
indicator("My Script")

t = timestamp("01 Jan 2022 00:00")

if barstate.islast 
    label.new(bar_index, high, str.tostring(t))

You should get something like this:

This happens because date and time are represented in the Unix format (the amount of milliseconds passed from 01 Jan 1970).

Using Mathematical Operations to Add/Subtract Dates

Pine Script does not provide native functions to compute dates by simply adding or subtracting a certain amount of time. However, we can still accomplish that by using simple mathematical operations. The idea is to declare date/time values as integer data types so we can easily compute dates by adding or subtracting milliseconds.

→ Multiples Table

Here is a small table with a multiple you need to add for every date element:

→ Sample Date/Time Operations

Here are some examples I created to demonstrate how you can use basic mathematical operations to compute dates (using milliseconds).

Add 1 day:

t2 = t1 + 86400000

Subtract 3 hours:

t3 = t1 – 3 * 3600000

Add 37 seconds:

t4 = t1 + 37 * 60000

Subtract 2 weeks:

t5 = t1 – 2 * 604800000

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