[objective-c] Get current date in milliseconds

Can any one give me an idea how to get the current date in milliseconds?

There are several ways of doing this, although my personal favorite is:

CFAbsoluteTime timeInSeconds = CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent();

You can read more about this method here. You can also create a NSDate object and get time by calling timeIntervalSince1970 which returns the seconds since 1/1/1970:

NSTimeInterval timeInSeconds = [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970];

And in Swift:

let timeInSeconds: TimeInterval = Date().timeIntervalSince1970

Cconvert NSTimeInterval milisecondedDate value to nsstring and after that convert into int.

Casting the NSTimeInterval directly to a long overflowed for me, so instead I had to cast to a long long.

long long milliseconds = (long long)([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] * 1000.0);

The result is a 13 digit timestamp as in Unix.

- (void)GetCurrentTimeStamp
    {
        NSDateFormatter *objDateformat = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
        [objDateformat setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"];
        NSString    *strTime = [objDateformat stringFromDate:[NSDate date]];
        NSString    *strUTCTime = [self GetUTCDateTimeFromLocalTime:strTime];//You can pass your date but be carefull about your date format of NSDateFormatter.
        NSDate *objUTCDate  = [objDateformat dateFromString:strUTCTime];
        long long milliseconds = (long long)([objUTCDate timeIntervalSince1970] * 1000.0);

        NSString *strTimeStamp = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%lld",milliseconds];
        NSLog(@"The Timestamp is = %@",strTimeStamp);
    }

 - (NSString *) GetUTCDateTimeFromLocalTime:(NSString *)IN_strLocalTime
    {
        NSDateFormatter *dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
        [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"];
        NSDate  *objDate    = [dateFormatter dateFromString:IN_strLocalTime];
        [dateFormatter setTimeZone:[NSTimeZone timeZoneWithAbbreviation:@"UTC"]];
        NSString *strDateTime   = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:objDate];
        return strDateTime;
    }

@JavaZava your solution is good, but if you want to have a 13 digit long value to be consistent with the time stamp formatting in Java or JavaScript (and other languages) use this method:

NSTimeInterval time = ([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970]); // returned as a double
long digits = (long)time; // this is the first 10 digits
int decimalDigits = (int)(fmod(time, 1) * 1000); // this will get the 3 missing digits
long timestamp = (digits * 1000) + decimalDigits;

or (if you need a string):

NSString *timestampString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%ld%d",digits ,decimalDigits];

Use this to get the time in milliseconds (long)(NSTimeInterval)([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970]).

NSTimeInterval milisecondedDate = ([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] * 1000);

You can just do this:

long currentTime = (long)(NSTimeInterval)([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970]);

this will return a value en milliseconds, so if you multiply the resulting value by 1000 (as suggested my Eimantas) you'll overflow the long type and it'll result in a negative value.

For example, if I run that code right now, it'll result in

currentTime = 1357234941

and

currentTime /seconds / minutes / hours / days = years
1357234941 / 60 / 60 / 24 / 365 = 43.037637652207

You can use following methods to get current date in milliseconds.

[[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970];

OR

double CurrentTime = CACurrentMediaTime(); 

Source: iPhone: How to get current milliseconds?

As mentioned before, [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] returns an NSTimeInterval, which is a duration in seconds, not milli-seconds.

You can visit https://currentmillis.com/ to see how you can get in the language you desire. Here is the list -

ActionScript    (new Date()).time
C++ std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(std::chrono::system_clock::now().time_since_epoch()).count()
C#.NET  DateTimeOffset.UtcNow.ToUnixTimeMilliseconds()
Clojure (System/currentTimeMillis)
Excel / Google Sheets*  = (NOW() - CELL_WITH_TIMEZONE_OFFSET_IN_HOURS/24 - DATE(1970,1,1)) * 86400000
Go / Golang time.Now().UnixNano() / 1000000
Hive*   unix_timestamp() * 1000
Java / Groovy / Kotlin  System.currentTimeMillis()
Javascript  new Date().getTime()
MySQL*  UNIX_TIMESTAMP() * 1000
Objective-C (long long)([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] * 1000.0)
OCaml   (1000.0 *. Unix.gettimeofday ())
Oracle PL/SQL*  SELECT (SYSDATE - TO_DATE('01-01-1970 00:00:00', 'DD-MM-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')) * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000 FROM DUAL
Perl    use Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday); print gettimeofday;
PHP round(microtime(true) * 1000)
PostgreSQL  extract(epoch FROM now()) * 1000
Python  int(round(time.time() * 1000))
Qt  QDateTime::currentMSecsSinceEpoch()
R*  as.numeric(Sys.time()) * 1000
Ruby    (Time.now.to_f * 1000).floor
Scala   val timestamp: Long = System.currentTimeMillis
SQL Server  DATEDIFF(ms, '1970-01-01 00:00:00', GETUTCDATE())
SQLite* STRFTIME('%s', 'now') * 1000
Swift*  let currentTime = NSDate().timeIntervalSince1970 * 1000
VBScript / ASP  offsetInMillis = 60000 * GetTimeZoneOffset()
WScript.Echo DateDiff("s", "01/01/1970 00:00:00", Now()) * 1000 - offsetInMillis + Timer * 1000 mod 1000

For objective C I did something like below to print it -

long long mills = (long long)([[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] * 1000.0);
 NSLog(@"Current date %lld", mills);

Hopw this helps.

extension NSDate {

    func toMillis() -> NSNumber {
        return NSNumber(longLong:Int64(timeIntervalSince1970 * 1000))
    }

    static func fromMillis(millis: NSNumber?) -> NSDate? {
        return millis.map() { number in NSDate(timeIntervalSince1970: Double(number) / 1000)}
    }

    static func currentTimeInMillis() -> NSNumber {
        return NSDate().toMillis()
    }
}

An extension on date is probably the best way to about it.

extension NSDate {
    func msFromEpoch() -> Double {
        return self.timeIntervalSince1970 * 1000
    }
}