How to convert std::chrono::time_point to string

Question

How to convert std::chrono::time_point to string? For example: "201601161125".

Answer 1

The most flexible way to do so is to convert it to struct tm and then use strftime (it's like sprintf for time). Something like:

std::chrono::system_clock::time_point now = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
std::time_t now_c = std::chrono::system_clock::to_time_t(now);
std::tm now_tm = *std::localtime(&now_c);
/// now you can format the string as you like with `strftime`

Look up the documentation for strftime here.

If you have localtime_s or localtime_r available you should use either in preference to localtime.

There are many other ways to do this, but, while mostly easier to use, these result in some predefined string representation. You could just "hide" all of the above in a function for ease of use.

Answer 2

Howard Hinnant's free, open source, header-only, portable date/time library is a modern way to do this that doesn't traffic through the old C API, and doesn't require that you discard all of your sub-second information. This library is also being proposed for standardization.

There is a lot of flexibility in formatting. The easiest way is to just stream out:

#include "date.h"
#include <iostream>

int
main()
{
    using namespace date;
    std::cout << std::chrono::system_clock::now() << '\n';
}

This just output for me:

2017-09-15 13:11:34.356648

The using namespace date; is required in order to find the streaming operator for the system_clock::time_point (it isn't legal for my lib to insert it into namespace std::chrono). No information is lost in this format: the full precision of your system_clock::time_point will be output (microseconds where I ran this on macOS).

The full suite of strftime-like formatting flags is available for other formats, with minor extensions to handle things like fractional seconds. Here is another example that outputs with millisecond precision:

#include "date.h"
#include <iostream>

int
main()
{
    using namespace date;
    using namespace std::chrono;
    std::cout << format("%D %T %Z\n", floor<milliseconds>(system_clock::now()));
}

which just output for me:

09/15/17 13:17:40.466 UTC