How to get current time and date in C++?

Question

Is there a cross-platform way to get the current date and time in C++?

Answer 1

You can try the following cross-platform code to get current date/time:

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

// Get current date/time, format is YYYY-MM-DD.HH:mm:ss
const std::string currentDateTime() {
    time_t     now = time(0);
    struct tm  tstruct;
    char       buf[80];
    tstruct = *localtime(&now);
    // Visit http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/chrono/c/strftime
    // for more information about date/time format
    strftime(buf, sizeof(buf), "%Y-%m-%d.%X", &tstruct);

    return buf;
}

int main() {
    std::cout << "currentDateTime()=" << currentDateTime() << std::endl;
    getchar();  // wait for keyboard input
}

Output:

currentDateTime()=2012-05-06.21:47:59

Please visit here for more information about date/time format