Get POSIX/Unix time in seconds and nanoseconds in Python?

Question

I\'ve been trying to find a way to get the time since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC in seconds and nanoseconds in python and I cannot find anything that will give me the proper pr

Answer 1

The problem is probably related to your OS, not Python. See the documentation of the time module: http://docs.python.org/library/time.html

time.time()

Return the time as a floating point number expressed in seconds since the epoch, in UTC. Note that even though the time is always returned as a floating point number, not all systems provide time with a better precision than 1 second. While this function normally returns non-decreasing values, it can return a lower value than a previous call if the system clock has been set back between the two calls.

In other words: if your OS can't do it, Python can't do it. You can multiply the return value by the appropriate order of magnitude in order to get the nanosecond value, though, imprecise as it may be.

EDIT: The return is a float variable, so the number of digits after the comma will vary, whether your OS has that level of precision or not. You can format it with "%.nf" where n is the number of digits you want, though, if you want a fixed point string representation.