C++ date and time

In this article, we will learn about the date and time formats in C++. There is no complete format in C++ for date and time so we inherit it from the c language. To use date and time in c++, <ctime> header file is added in the program.

<ctime>

This header file has four time-related types as follows -

• Clock_t - It stands for clock type which is an alias of arithmetic type. It represents clock tick counts(units of a time of a constant with system-specific length). Clock_t is the type returned by clock()/.
• Time_t - It stands for time_type. It represents the time that is returned by function time(). It outputs an integral value as the number of seconds elapsed when time passes by 00:00 hours.
• Size_t - It is an alias for an unsigned integer type and represents the size of any object in bytes. Size_t is the result of the sizeof() operator which prints sizes and counts.
• tm - The tm structure holds date and time in the C structure. It is defined as follows -

Date and time functions in c++

Example to print current date and time

Below is the example to print the current date and time in the UTC format.

Code

Output

The local date and time is: Wed Sep 22 16:31:40 2021

The UTC date and time is: Wed Sep 22 16:31:40 2021

The below code tells how to break the tm structure and to print each attribute independently with the use of -> operator.

Code

Output

Number of seconds since January 1,2021 is:: 1632328553
Year:2021
Month: 9
Day: 22
Time: 21:65:53