Decimal Seconds?

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Hi.

I’m looking at https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+16+Function_STRFTIME and trying to work out how to obtain an Epoch timestamp for “now” containing fractional / decimal seconds so that the %3q format parameter works.

https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Standard+Channel+Variables doesn’t seem to tell me.

Can someone point me in the right direction please?

Antony.

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4 thoughts on - Decimal Seconds?

  • Hi.

    Has nobody got a clue for me about this?

    It must be possible somehow, otherwise the %3q parameter wouldn’t exist…

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    I do sometimes wish it had been *my* plan, though.

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  • What have you actually tried? STRFTIME(NOW,America/Detroit,%3q) doesn’t work?

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    From: asterisk-users —
    My life is going completely according to plan.

    I do sometimes wish it had been *my* plan, though.

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  • That works – thank you for the pointer. I was not aware of the word “NOW” – I
    have always used the variable ${EPOCH} when I needed a timestamp.

    Do you know where this is documented? I would have expected it to be in https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Standard+Channel+Variables for example, which does mention ${EPOCH}, and also shows an example of
    ${STRFTIME()}, using ${EPOCH} as the timestamp value.

    Antony.

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  • Hi Antony,

    NOW is not a variable…

    In the majority of cases (the exceptions are things like CUT)… variables are utilized by ${}

    If NOW was a variable you would see it written as ${NOW}

    The word NOW is actually not special. Deep in the Asterisk source (if you are curious), the flow is this:

    acf_strftime
    -> ast_get_timeval

    “NOW” gets passed as a string to ast_get_timeval, which really scans for a numeric unixtime. If the scan fails (if the input is not a proper seconds-since-epoch-unixtime), then it uses a default.

    Oddly enough you could pass “POTATO” to STRFTIME and it would work just fine… since no matter what the value is, if it doesn’t parse properly the default is ast_tvnow which is a high resolution ‘now’

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