How to get the current time as 13-digit integer in Ruby?

Question

I have this jQuery function that returns the current time as the number of milliseconds since the epoch (Jan 1, 1970):

time = new Date().getTime(); 

Is there a way to do the same in Ruby?

Right now, I am using Ruby's Time.now.to_i which works great but returns a 10-digit integer (number of seconds)

How can I get it to display the number of milliseconds, as in jQuery?

Answer 1

require 'date'  p DateTime.now.strftime('%s') # "1384526946" (seconds) p DateTime.now.strftime('%Q') # "1384526946523" (milliseconds) 

Answer 2

Javascript's gettime() returns the number of milliseconds since epoch.

Ruby's Time.now.to_i will give you the number of seconds since epoch. If you change that to Time.now.to_f, you still get seconds but with a fractional component. Just multiply that by 1,000 and you have milliseconds. Then use #to_i to convert it to an integer. And you end up with:

(Time.now.to_f * 1000).to_i