How to get the number of milliseconds elapsed so far today

Question

I want to get the current time and date in milliseconds. How can I get this?

I tried this:

Date date=new Date() ;  
System.out.println(\"Today is \" +dat         


        

Answer 1

This is not the correct approach for Java 8 or newer. This answer is retained for posterity; for any reasonably modern Java use Basil Bourque's approach instead.

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The following seems to work.

Calendar rightNow = Calendar.getInstance();

// offset to add since we're not UTC
long offset = rightNow.get(Calendar.ZONE_OFFSET) +
    rightNow.get(Calendar.DST_OFFSET);
long sinceMidnight = (rightNow.getTimeInMillis() + offset) %
    (24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);

System.out.println(sinceMidnight + " milliseconds since midnight");

The problem is that date.getTime() returns the number of milliseconds from 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z, but new Date() gives the current local time. Adding the ZONE_OFFSET and DST_OFFSET from the Calendar class gives you the time in the default/current time zone.