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Get UTC Time in Generated Code

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Michael
Michael on 14 Aug 2023
Answered: Corey Silva on 19 Sep 2023
I need to get UTC time down to miliseconds at least (i.e. 1692039433503685.321 seconds) in a piece of generated code C++ code. Unfortunately, Coder doesn't support the 'TimeZone' inputs in datetime, otherwise I'd just use posixtime( datetime('now','TimeZone','UTC') ).
I tried using coder.ceval to call the fuctions in the chono C++ library, but the UTC clock there is only available in the C++20 language standard and Matlab only supports up to C++11.
Is there a good way of doing this?
  4 Comments
Rik
Rik on 15 Aug 2023
There is a UTC in C. Can you use that?
My getUTC function doesn't support code generation, but it does include this C function:
utc_time_c={'#include "mex.h"';
'#include "time.h"';
'';
'/* Abraham Cohn, 3/17/2005 */';
'/* Philips Medical Systems */';
'';
'void mexFunction(int nlhs, mxArray *plhs[], int nrhs,';
' const mxArray *prhs[])';
'{';
' time_t utc;';
' ';
' if (nlhs > 1) {';
' mexErrMsgTxt("Too many output arguments");';
' }';
' ';
' /* Here is a nice ref: www.cplusplus.com/ref/ctime/time.html */';
' time(&utc);';
' /* mexPrintf("UTC time in local zone: %s",ctime(&utc)); */';
' /* mexPrintf("UTC time in GMT: %s",asctime(gmtime(&utc))); */';
' ';
' /* Create matrix for the return argument. */';
' plhs[0] = mxCreateDoubleScalar((double)utc);';
' ';
'}'};
Denis Gurchenkov
Denis Gurchenkov on 18 Sep 2023
Hi Mike, I don't have an answer to the main questipn you have, but one possible avenue for progress is to use the C++ 20 functions.
You said that "MATLAB Coder only supports up to C++11" - that is not quite correct. Coder-generated code should work just fine with C++20. The page you referred to just says "coder does not know how to use the C++20 features - at most, it'll generate code using C++11 features". But since C++ standards are generally forward compatible, you should be able to just set the language flag for the C++ compiler. If you add the following line to your matlab function:
coder.updateBuildInfo('addCompileFlags','/std:c++20');
and generate code using "codegen ... -lang:C++" then you should /std:c++20 added to the c compiler command line.

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Answers (1)

Corey Silva
Corey Silva on 19 Sep 2023
Hi Michael,
You should be all set to use posixtime here with an unzoned datetime.
From the posixtime help text:
"If T is unzoned, then POSIXTIME treats T as though its time zone is UTC, and not your local time zone."
This means that posixtime(datetime('now','TimeZone','UTC')) and posixtime(datetime('now')) have the same output.

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