I am trying to retrieve Current Time in milliseconds using boost library.. Below is my code which I am using to get the current time in milliseconds.
boost::posix_time::ptime time = boost::posix_time::microsec_clock::local_time();
boost::posix_time::time_duration duration( time.time_of_day() );
std::cout << duration.total_milliseconds() << std::endl;
uint64_t timestampInMilliseconds = duration.total_milliseconds() // will this work or not?
std::cout << timestampInMilliseconds << std::endl;
But this prints out in 10 digit which is like 17227676.. I am running my code on my ubuntu machine.. And I believe it is always 13 digit long value? Isn't so?
After computing the timestamp in milliseconds, I need to use below formula on that -
int end = (timestampInMilliseconds / (60 * 60 * 1000 * 24)) % 14
But somehow I am not sure whether timestampInMilliseconds which I am getting is right or not?
First of all should I be using boost::posix or not? I am assuming there might be some better way.. I am running code on my ubuntu machine..
Update:-
As this piece of bash script prints out timestampInMilliseconds which is of 13 digit..
date +%s%N | cut -b1-13
The problem here is that you use time_of_day() which returns (from this reference)
Get the time offset in the day.
So from the value you provided in the question I can deduce that you ran this program at 4:47 am.
Instead you might want to use e.g. the to_tm() to get a struct tm and construct your time in milliseconds from there.
Also note that the %s format to the date command (and the strftime function) is the number of seconds since the epoch, not the number of milliseconds.
If you look at the tm structure, you will see that it has the number of years (since 1900, so subtract 70 here), days into the year, and then hours,, minutes and seconds into the day. All these can be used to calculate the time in seconds easily.
And that in seconds is the problem here. If you look at e.g. the POSIX time function you see that
shall return the value of time in seconds since the Epoch
If you want an accurate millisecond resolution you simply can't use the ptime (where the p stands for POSIX). If you want millisecond resolution you either have to use e.g. system functions that returns the time in higher resolutions (like gettimeofday), or you can see e.g. this old SO answer.
Related
I'm fiddling around with time representation in C++.
I would like to have a strictly monotonic representation of time, that handles leap seconds well. The utc_clock in C++20 should be able to do that, and since my compiler doesn't support this version yet, I'm using HowardHinnant/date.
To understand the library better I have started making small test cases, but got stuck on one.
I take two dates, before and after insertion of a leap second and check that duration between those two dates actually has the extra second.
This is the test case:
TEST(DateTime, TimeLeap)
{
using namespace std::chrono;
using namespace date;
// Two dates with a leap second in between
// https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
auto t1 = clock_cast<utc_clock>(static_cast<sys_days>(2016_y/December/31));
auto t2 = clock_cast<utc_clock>(static_cast<sys_days>(2017_y/January/1));
EXPECT_EQ(duration_cast<seconds>(t2 - t1).count(), 24 * 3600 + 1);
}
but it fails for me:
common/tests/datetime.cpp:39: Failure
Expected: duration_cast<seconds>(t2 - t1).count()
Which is: 86400
To be equal to: 24 * 3600 + 1
Which is: 86401
It seems that the conversion between sys_clock and utc_clock doesn't add the leap second.
Suspecting that the problem is the resolution of sys_days, I've also tried doing a time_point_cast<seconds>(...) before the clock_cast<utc_clock>, but the result didn't change.
I've also tried using 2017-01-02 as the second date, in case there was an issue with distinction between 2016-12-31 23:59:60 and 2017-01-01 00:00 -- the leap second also didn't appear there.
It looks like you're using the OS supplied timezone database (USE_OS_TZDB=1), and that the leapseconds aren't being read. This can be confirmed with:
cout << get_tzdb().leap_seconds.size() << '\n';
This should output 27 (currently), but for you I imagine it is outputting 0. This means leapsecond data is missing.
With a recent (2020-09-11) commit: https://github.com/HowardHinnant/date/commit/ba99134b8a7c4a6e7d28d738a0234a85dc6bd827, the leapsecond data is read from either one of these files:
zoneinfo/leapseconds
zoneinfo/leap-seconds.list
Both of these files are IANA-supplied, but have slightly different formats. Either file will do as they have duplicate information in them. tz.cpp will search for both. If your platform doesn't ship either one of these files, you can download it from the IANA data download and copy it into place manually.
I have a large data set with timestamps that are in UTC time in milliseconds. I'm synchronizing this data set with another's who has timestamps of microseconds past the hour, so I need to convert the first to local time, in seconds past the hour.
Most of the similar questions I've read on this subject get UTC time from the time() function which gets the current time.
I've tried implementing the following which was pulled from C++ Reference.
The timestamp I'm trying to convert is a double, but I'm not sure how to actually use this value.
An example ts from my data set: 1512695257869
int main ()
{
double my_utc_ts; //value acquired from the data set
time_t rawtime;
struct tm * ptm;
time ( &rawtime ); //getting current time
//rawtime = my_utc_ts; //this is what I tried and is wrong, and results in a nullptr
ptm = gmtime ( &rawtime );
puts ("Current time around the World:");
printf ("Phoenix, AZ (U.S.) : %2d:%02d\n", (ptm->tm_hour+MST)%24, ptm->tm_min);
return 0;
}
After I'm able to convert it to a usable gmtime object or whatever, I need to get seconds past the hour... I think I'll be able to figure this part out if I can get the UTC timestamps to successfully convert, but I haven't thought this far ahead.
Guidance would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
After I'm able to convert it to a usable gmtime object or whatever, I need to get seconds past the hour...
Here is how you can convert a double representing milliseconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to seconds past the local hour using Howard Hinnant's, free, open-source, C++11/14/17 timezone library which is based on <chrono>:
#include "date/tz.h"
#include <iostream>
int
main()
{
using namespace std::chrono;
using namespace date;
double my_utc_ts = 1512695257869;
using ms = duration<double, std::milli>;
sys_time<milliseconds> utc_ms{round<milliseconds>(ms{my_utc_ts})};
auto loc_s = make_zoned(current_zone(), floor<seconds>(utc_ms)).get_local_time();
auto sec_past_hour = loc_s - floor<hours>(loc_s);
std::cout << utc_ms << " UTC\n";
std::cout << sec_past_hour << " past the local hour\n";
}
This outputs for me:
2017-12-08 01:07:37.869 UTC
457s past the local hour
If your local time zone is not an integral number of hours offset from UTC, the second line of output will be different for you.
Explanation of code:
We start with your input my_utc_ts.
The next line creates a custom std::chrono::duration that has double as the representation and milliseconds as the precision. This type-alias is named ms.
The next line constructs utc_ms which is a std::chrono::time_point<system_clock, milliseconds> holding 1512695257869, and represents the time point 2017-12-08 01:07:37.869 UTC. So far, no actual computation has been performed. Simply the double 1512695257869 has been cast into a type which represents an integral number of milliseconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
This line starts the computation:
auto loc_s = make_zoned(current_zone(), floor<seconds>(utc_ms)).get_local_time();
This creates a {time_zone, system_time} pair capable of mapping between UTC and a local time, using time_zone as that map. It uses current_zone() to find the computer's current time zone, and truncates the time point utc_ms from a precision of milliseconds to a precision of seconds. Finally the trailing .get_local_time() extracts the local time from this mapping, with a precision of seconds, and mapped into the current time zone. That is, loc_s is a count of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, offset by your-local-time-zone's UTC offset that was in effect at 2017-12-08 01:07:37 UTC.
Now if you truncate loc_s to a precision of hours, and subtract that truncated time point from loc_s, you'll get the seconds past the local hour:
auto sec_past_hour = loc_s - floor<hours>(loc_s);
The entire computation is just the two lines of code above. The next two lines simply stream out utc_ms and sec_past_hour.
Assuming that your local time zone was offset from UTC by an integral number of hours at 2017-12-08 01:07:37 UTC, you can double-check that:
457 == 7*60 + 37
Indeed, if you can assume that your local time zone is always offset from UTC by an integral number of hours, the above program can be simplified by not mapping into local time at all:
sys_time<milliseconds> utc_ms{round<milliseconds>(ms{my_utc_ts})};
auto utc_s = floor<seconds>(utc_ms);
auto sec_past_hour = utc_s - floor<hours>(utc_s);
The results will be identical.
(Warning: Not all time zones are offset from UTC by an integral number of hours)
And if your database is known to be generated with a time zone that is not the computer's current local time zone, that can be taken into account by replacing current_zone() with the IANA time zone identifier that your database was generated with, for example:
auto loc_s = make_zoned("America/New_York", floor<seconds>(utc_ms)).get_local_time();
Update
This entire library is based on the std <chrono> library introduced with C++11. The types above utc_ms and loc_s are instantiations of std::chrono::time_point, and sec_past_hour has type std::chrono::seconds (which is itself an instantiation of std::chrono::duration).
durations can be converted to their "representation" type using the .count() member function. For seconds, this representation type will be a signed 64 bit integer.
For a more detailed video tutorial on <chrono>, please see this Cppcon 2016 presentation. This presentation will encourage you to avoid using the .count() member function as much as humanly possible.
For example instead of converting sec_past_hour to a long so that you can compare it to other values of your dataset, convert other values of your dataset to std::chrono::durations so that you can compare them to sec_past_hour.
For example:
long other_data = 123456789; // past the hour in microseconds
if (microseconds{other_data} < sec_past_hour)
// ...
This snippet shows how <chrono> will take care of units conversions for you. This means you won't make mistakes like dividing by 1,000,000 when you should have multiplied, or spelling "million" with the wrong number of zeroes.
I'd start by converting the floating point number to a time_t. A time_t is normally a count of seconds since an epoch (most often the POSIX epoch--midnight, 1 Jan 1970), so it sounds like that's going to take little more than a bit of fairly simple math.
So let's assume for the sake of argument that your input uses a different epoch. Just for the sake of argument let's assume it's using an epoch of midnight, 1 jan 1900 instead (and, as noted, it's in milliseconds instead of seconds).
So, to convert that to a time_t, you'd start by dividing by 1000 to convert from milliseconds to seconds. Then you'd subtract off the number of seconds between midnight 1 jan 1900 and midnight 1 jan 1970. Now you have a value you can treat as a time_t that the standard library can deal with1.
Then use localtime to get that same time as a struct tm.
Then zero out the minutes and seconds from that tm, and use mktime to get a time_t representing that time.
Finally, use difftime to get the difference between the two.
1. For the moment, I'm assuming your standard library is based around a standard POSIX epoch, but that's a pretty safe assumption.
I am trying to capture packets from the NIC and save part of the packet payload as a string.
On part of packet that must be stored is its Log Time known as SysLog. Each packets has a SysLog with the following Format:
Nov 01 03 14:50:25 TCP...[other parts of packet Payload]
As it can be seen, the packet SysLog has no Year Number. My program must be running all over the year, so I need to add Year Number to the packet SysLog and convert SysLog to epoch time. The final string that I have to store is like this:
1478175389-TCP, ….
I use the following peace of code to convert Syslog to EpochTime.
tm* tm_date = new tm();
Std ::string time = Current_Year;
time += " ";
time += packet.substr(0,18);
strptime(time.c_str(), "%Y %b %d %T", tm_date);
EpochTime = timegm(tm_date);
The currentYear Method:
std::string currentYear() {
std::stringstream now;
auto tp = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
auto ms = std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(tp.time_since_epoch());
size_t modulo = ms.count() % 1000;
time_t seconds = std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::seconds>(ms).count();
#if HAS_STD_PUT_TIME
#else
char buffer[25]; // holds "2013-12-01 21:31:42"
if (strftime(buffer, 25, "%Y", localtime(&seconds))) {
now << buffer;
}
#endif // HAS_STD_PUT_TIME
return now.str();
}
The above operations are what i have to do for every packets. The packet rate is 100000-1000000 pps and the above peace of code is very time consuming specially on currentYear().
One possible optimization is to remove currentYear() Method and save the
Year number as a constant value. As said earlier my program must be run all over the year and as you know 2017 is comming. We can not change our binary at 31/12/2016 23:59:00 and also we don’t want to waste our time for calculating Year Number!!
I need a more efficient way to calculate the current year number without running it for each packet.
Is it possible? What is your suggestion for me?
Once you have obtained the current date and time, based on this it shouldn't be too difficult to calculate what the epoch time will be for midnight of next January 1st.
After calculating the expected epoch time for when the year rolls around, going forward all you have to do is compare it to the current time, when making a log entry. If it hasn't reached the precalculated Jan 1 midnight time, you know that the year hasn't rolled around yet.
So, you don't need to calculate the year for every packet at all. Just need to check the current time against the precalculated January 1st midnight time, which shouldn't change unless the politicians decide to change your timezone, while all of this is running...
The year is changed for log entries beginning with Jan, and only those log entries.
Log entries sometimes come out of order, or carry a timestamp saved during previous processing.
Attaching the year from the PC clock will give bad results, such as
2016 Dec 31 23:59:58 normal
2016 Jan 01 00:01:01 printing time placed in packet by remote device, remote clock is running a bit fast
2017 Dec 31 23:59:59 printing timestamp saved locally two seconds before logging occurred
2017 Jan 01 00:00:03 back to normal
You can't just concatenate the year of local clock with the month...second of the log message. You have to assign the year that avoids large clock jumps.
Since you're trying to produce Unix time (seconds since epoch) anyway, start by turning the log message time into Julian (seconds since start of year) and test whether the Julian is less than or greater than say 10 million (roughly 4 months).
You can "cache" the string you generate and only change it when the year changes. It may be though just a "little" improvement depending on what operations take the most time.
//somewhere
static int currentYear = 0;
static std::string yearStr = "";
//in your function
auto now = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
auto tnow = system_clock::to_time_t(now);
auto lt = localtime(&tnow); //or gmtime depends on your needs.
if(currentYear != lt.tm_year)
{
yearStr = std::to_string(lt.tm_year + 1900);
currentYear = t.tm_year;
}
return yearStr;
I am not sure if static has any negative/positive aspects on the performance of reading the string or a member variable may be better here due to cache locality. You have to test this.
If you use this in multiple threads you have to use a mutex here which probably will reduce performance though (again you have to measure this).
First, you might consider currentYear() returning an int (e.g. 2016), probably with time(2), localtime_r(3), the tm_year field.... You'll then avoid making C++ strings.
Then, you speak of high packet rate, so you probably have some event loop. You don't explain how it is done (hopefully you use some library à la libevent, or at least your own loop around poll(2)....), but you might compute the current year only once every tenth of second in that event loop. Or have some other thread computing the current year once in a while (you'll probably need a mutex, or use std::atomic<int> as the type of current year...)
I am new to boost and chrono. I am writing a logger that logs the timestamps of API calls, entry and exit. I tried using boost::xtime first, but it wasn't giving the high resolution value I needed. Hence was thinking about using Chrono. I declared a boost::chrono::hight_resolution_clock::time_stamp x; variable for getting the timestamp and assigned it to boost::chrono::hight_resolution_clock::now ();. Now, I need to get the nanoseconds from this variable and put it in my log file (thats the requirement). So I cast it boost::chrono::duration_cast (x). But it just wouldn't let me do that. It needs 2 parameters apparently, and I only have one. Is there a way to get around this?. Is it possible to create another time_stamp variable and assign zero to it and use that variable?. I tried assigning zero, but its not working. Kindly help me out.
Thanks,
Sam
If tagged c++11, any reason why not to use std::chrono?
// Using std::chrono
auto start = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now(); // start timer
/* do some work */
auto diff = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now() - start; // get difference
auto nsec = std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::nanoseconds>(diff);
std::cout << "it took: " << nsec.count() << " nanoseconds" << std::endl;
boost::chrono::duration_cast converts a duration into the specified units, but you've given it a boost::chrono::time_point, not a duration.
There's really no such thing as "the current time in nanoseconds". To get a duration, you need to specify the time since which you want to know how many nanoseconds have elapsed (an "epoch"). Different clocks will measure their time based on different epochs.
boost::chrono::system_clock (currently) uses the Unix epoch (midnight Jan 1, 1970) as its epoch, but it's not steady and it may not have the resolution you need (it's in nanoseconds on my Ubuntu box, but in 1/10,000,000ths of a second on my Windows box).
boost::chrono::high_resolution_clock uses boot up as its epoch, is steady, and measures time in nanoseconds on both boxes I tested on.
Boost also provides other clocks like process_cpu_clock that use other epochs and count in other units.
Thus you can get nanos since Jan 1, 1970 using system_clock, but it may not actually be nanosecond-accurate, and it may go backwards if the user changes the system time or the computer syncs with network time, or you can get nanos since some other point in time using high_resolution_clock.
How can you obtain the system clock's current time of day (in milliseconds) in C++? This is a windows specific app.
The easiest (and most direct) way is to call GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(), which returns a FILETIME, a struct which stores the 64-bit number of 100-nanosecond intervals since midnight Jan 1, 1601.
At least at the time of Windows NT 3.1, 3.51, and 4.01, the GetSystemTimeAsFileTime() API was the fastest user-mode API able to retrieve the current time. It also offers the advantage (compared with GetSystemTime() -> SystemTimeToFileTime()) of being a single API call, that under normal circumstances cannot fail.
To convert a FILETIME ft_now; to a 64-bit integer named ll_now, use the following:
ll_now = (LONGLONG)ft_now.dwLowDateTime + ((LONGLONG)(ft_now.dwHighDateTime) << 32LL);
You can then divide by the number of 100-nanosecond intervals in a millisecond (10,000 of those) and you have milliseconds since the Win32 epoch.
To convert to the Unix epoch, subtract 116444736000000000LL to reach Jan 1, 1970.
You mentioned a desire to find the number of milliseconds into the current day. Because the Win32 epoch begins at a midnight, the number of milliseconds passed so far today can be calculated from the filetime with a modulus operation. Specifically, because there are 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute * 1000 milliseconds/second = 86,400,000 milliseconds/day, you could user the modulus of the system time in milliseconds modulus 86400000LL.
For a different application, one might not want to use the modulus. Especially if one is calculating elapsed times, one might have difficulties due to wrap-around at midnight. These difficulties are solvable, the best example I am aware is Linus Torvald's line in the Linux kernel which handles counter wrap around.
Keep in mind that the system time is returned as a UTC time (both in the case of GetSystemTimeAsFileTime() and simply GetSystemTime()). If you require the local time as configured by the Administrator, then you could use GetLocalTime().
To get the time expressed as UTC, use GetSystemTime in the Win32 API.
SYSTEMTIME st;
GetSystemTime(&st);
SYSTEMTIME is documented as having these relevant members:
WORD wYear;
WORD wMonth;
WORD wDayOfWeek;
WORD wDay;
WORD wHour;
WORD wMinute;
WORD wSecond;
WORD wMilliseconds;
As shf301 helpfully points out below, GetLocalTime (with the same prototype) will yield a time corrected to the user's current timezone.
You have a few good answers here, depending on what you're after. If you're looking for just time of day, my answer is the best approach -- if you need solid dates for arithmetic, consider Alex's. There's a lot of ways to skin the time cat on Windows, and some of them are more accurate than others (and nobody has mentioned QueryPerformanceCounter yet).
A cut-to-the-chase example of Jed's answer above:
const std::string currentDateTime() {
SYSTEMTIME st, lt;
GetSystemTime(&st);
char currentTime[84] = "";
sprintf(currentTime,"%d/%d/%d %d:%d:%d %d",st.wDay,st.wMonth,st.wYear, st.wHour, st.wMinute, st.wSecond , st.wMilliseconds);
return string(currentTime); }
Use GetSystemTime, first; then, if you need that, you can call SystemTimeToFileTime on the SYSTEMTIME structure that the former fills for you. A FILETIME is a 64-bit count of 100-nanosecs intervals since an epoch, and so more suitable for arithmetic; a SYSTEMTIME is a structure with all the expected fields (year, month, day, hour, etc, down to milliseconds). If you want to know "how many milliseconds have elapsed since midnight", for example, subtracting two FILETIME structures (one for the current time, one obtained by converting the same SYSTEMTIME after zeroing out the appropriate fields) and dividing by the appropriate power of ten is probably the simplest available approach.
Depending on the needs of your application there are six common options. This Dr Dobbs Journal article will give you all the information (and more) you need on choosing the best one.
In your specific case, from this article:
GetSystemTime() retrieves the current
system time and instantiates a
SYSTEMTIME structure, which is
composed of a number of separate
fields including year, month, day,
hours, minutes, seconds, and
milliseconds.
Here is some code that works in Windows which I've used in a Open Watcom C project. It should work in C++ It returns seconds (not milliseconds) using _dos_gettime or gettime
double seconds(void)
{
#ifdef __WATCOMC__
struct dostime_t t;
_dos_gettime(&t);
return ((double)t.hour * 3600 + (double)t.minute * 60 + (double)t.second + (double)t.hsecond * 0.01);
#else
struct time t;
gettime(&t);
return ((double)t.ti_hour * 3600 + (double)t.ti_min * 60 + (double)t.ti_sec + (double)t.ti_hund * 0.01);
#endif
}
While it's not what the question asks, it's worth considering why you want this info.
If all you want to do is keep track of how long something takes to calculate or the time past since the last user interaction, consider using the uptime (milliseconds since boot), which is much simpler to get: GetTickCount() or GetTickCount64(). This is all I wanted to do but I went down the epoch rabbit hole first because that's how you do it under unix.