Date to milliseconds and back to date in Swift

Question

I am taking the current time, in UTC, and putting it in nanaoseconds and then I need to take the nanoseconds and go back to a date in local time. I am able to do get the tim

Answer 1

Unless you absolutely have to convert the date to an integer, consider using a Double instead to represent the time interval. After all, this is the type that timeIntervalSince1970 returns. All of the answers that convert to integers loose sub-millisecond precision, but this solution is much more accurate (although you will still lose some precision due to floating-point imprecision).

public extension Date {
    
    /// The interval, in milliseconds, between the date value and
    /// 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970.
    /// Equivalent to `self.timeIntervalSince1970 * 1000`.
    var millisecondsSince1970: Double {
        return self.timeIntervalSince1970 * 1000
    }

    /**
     Creates a date value initialized relative to 00:00:00 UTC
     on 1 January 1970 by a given number of **milliseconds**.
     
     equivalent to
     ```
     self.init(timeIntervalSince1970: TimeInterval(milliseconds) / 1000)
     ```
     - Parameter millisecondsSince1970: A time interval in milliseconds.
     */
    init(millisecondsSince1970: Double) {
        self.init(timeIntervalSince1970: TimeInterval(milliseconds) / 1000)
    }

}

Answer 2

//Date to milliseconds
func currentTimeInMiliseconds() -> Int {
    let currentDate = Date()
    let since1970 = currentDate.timeIntervalSince1970
    return Int(since1970 * 1000)
}

//Milliseconds to date
extension Int {
    func dateFromMilliseconds() -> Date {
        return Date(timeIntervalSince1970: TimeInterval(self)/1000)
    }
}

I removed seemingly useless conversion via string and all those random !.

Answer 3

Heres a simple solution in Swift 5/iOS 13.

extension Date {
    
    func toMilliseconds() -> Int64 {
        Int64(self.timeIntervalSince1970 * 1000)
    }

    init(milliseconds:Int) {
        self = Date().advanced(by: TimeInterval(integerLiteral: Int64(milliseconds / 1000)))
    }
}

This however assumes you have calculated the difference between UTF time and local time and adjusted and accounted for in the milliseconds. For that look to calendar

var cal = Calendar.current
cal.timeZone = TimeZone(abbreviation: "UTC")!
let difference = cal.compare(dateGiven, to: date, toGranularity: .nanosecond)