Re: What do I use if not `float-time'?

[Deniz Dogan <deniz.a.m.dogan@gmail.com>]

2010/1/6 Davis Herring <herring@lanl.gov>:
>> Okay, so what do I use instead? I just want a "UNIX timestamp" as an
>> integer or string. What's the idiomatic way to get that?
>
> Use `current-time'.  The trick is that you then have to deal with multiple
> integers (because Emacs ints are (often) shorter than 32 bits).
> `float-time' exists to avoid that inconvenience at the cost of another.
> In practice, using the integer parts of calls to (float-time) should be
> fine so long as you don't do too much arithmetic on them: doubles have 53
> bits of mantissa, and so can represent any reasonable traditional
> (integer) time stamp exactly.
>
> To get a string version of the integer part (which you can't safely turn
> into an integer!), you can just use (format-time-string "%s").
>

Thanks, the `format-time-string' trick works like a charm. I actually
needed a string in the first place, so that was perfect.

-- 
Deniz Dogan