# Dates - Randomly generating DateTime values
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dates-randomly-generating-datetime-values/15156
**Category:** Data
**Created:** [September 19, 2018, 6:27am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dates-randomly-generating-datetime-values/15156 "2018-09-19T06:27:29Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@mdsalerno](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mdsalerno)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2018, 6:27am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dates-randomly-generating-datetime-values/15156/1 "2018-09-19T06:27:29Z")
I have two DateTimes, dt1 \< dt2. What is a reasonable way to randomly generate a DateTime that is in between dt1 and dt2? I started off by trying
`dt3 = rand(dt1.instant.periods.value : dt2.instant.periods.value)`.
This gives me a randomly generated Int64 representation, but I do not know how to properly convert it back to a DateTime. Calling `DateTime(dt3)` doesn’t seem to parse correctly, presumably because it needs dt3 to be of type Millisecond as opposed to Int64, but I do not know how to convert from Int64 back to Millisecond.
---
### Author:  [@Simon\_Bolland](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Simon_Bolland)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2018, 7:57am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dates-randomly-generating-datetime-values/15156/2 "2018-09-19T07:57:33Z")
You could do
```julia
unix2datetime(rand(datetime2unix(dt1) : datetime2unix(dt2)))
```
but I suspect there’s a more efficient way
---
### Author:  [@Daneel](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Daneel)
#### Post date: [September 19, 2018, 8:16am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dates-randomly-generating-datetime-values/15156/3 "2018-09-19T08:16:26Z")
It doesn’t feel very elegant and there is probably a better way but this is the way I came up with.
```julia
t0 = DateTime(2018,9,19)
t1 = DateTime(2018,9,19,10)
n = 5 # Number of values
t_random = t0 + Dates.Millisecond.(floor.(rand(n)*(t1-t0).value))
```