Current system time as a Timestamp

Hey,

I want to get the current system time in microseconds and share this timestamp with other computer via UDP. How to do that. fprintf('This message is sent at time %f', time) Is something like above possible in matlab? Please help me with this.

Answer 1

[Robert]

Try

help now

for details on MATLAB's function now that returns the current time as a DateNum. You might also be interested in clock or cputime.

Answer 2

[Ilham Hardy]

fprintf('This message is sent at time %s\n', datestr(now,'HH:MM:SS.FFF'))

[PTP]

Hi Hardy,

Can i also get microseconds with this. It would be really nice if I could achieve that. I tried this fprintf('This message is sent at time %s\n', datestr(now,'HH:MM:SS.FFFFFF')) but shows errors.

Thanks

[Walter Roberson]

No, you cannot get microseconds when you use datestr and now. The underlying representation is only accurate to less than 10 microseconds for times near this century. If you want to print the guaranteed inaccurate microseconds then you will need to format them yourself.

Answer 3

[Jan]

A timestamp with a precision of microseconds is not meaningful, when the command to obtain the timestamp needs more than a microsecond. Then it is not exactly defined if the stamp belongs to the time before or after the command.

Answer 4

[Walter Roberson]

No, this is not implemented by MATLAB. It is difficult to do, and the techniques are operating-system dependent.

http://www.windowstimestamp.com/

Answer 5

[Peter Perkins]

This is an old post the got reopened. I feel compelled to say that in anything like recent versions of MATLAB, datetime('now') is much preferred over now.

On Windows, the clock function and datetime('now') both return a system time rounded to milliseconds. On Linux or Mac, it's rounded to microseconds. Whether or not either of those is actually accurate or not depends entirely on your system though.

[Haoran WANG]

Thank you for your hint. But how get microseconds system time in matlab in windows?

[Walter Roberson]

Haoran WANG : are you looking for clock time down to microsecond precision, or are you looking to create relative timings down to microsecond precision?

Getting the system clock down to microsecond is not easy. Microsoft says that for microseconds you should be querying the performance counters instead, but those are for relative times not for clock times.

For information on querying the performance counters in Windows see https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/37716-pause-function-in-matlab-for-1-millisecond#answer_97980