datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime('%Y-%m%d %H:%M:%S.000%f')

Seems to work for me.

Physically you should do this to get the correct representation of the time:

datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime('%Y-%m%d %H:%M:%S.%f000')

The simplest way would be to use slicing to just chop off the last three digits of the microseconds:

def format_time():
    t = datetime.datetime.now()
    s = t.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')
    return s[:-3]

I strongly recommend just chopping. I once wrote some logging code that rounded the timestamps rather than chopping, and I found it actually kind of confusing when the rounding changed the last digit. There was timed code that stopped running at a certain timestamp yet there were log events with that timestamp due to the rounding. Simpler and more predictable to just chop.

If you want to actually round the number rather than just chopping, it's a little more work but not horrible:

def format_time():
    t = datetime.datetime.now()
    s = t.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')
    head = s[:-7] # everything up to the '.'
    tail = s[-7:] # the '.' and the 6 digits after it
    f = float(tail)
    temp = "{:.03f}".format(f)  # for Python 2.x: temp = "%.3f" % f
    new_tail = temp[1:] # temp[0] is always '0'; get rid of it
    return head + new_tail

Obviously you can simplify the above with fewer variables; I just wanted it to be very easy to follow.

To get a date string with milliseconds, use [:-3] to trim the last three digits of %f (microseconds):

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.utcnow().strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f')[:-3]
'2022-09-24 10:18:32.926'

Or shorter:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.utcnow().strftime('%F %T.%f')[:-3]
'2022-09-24 10:18:32.926'

See the Python docs for more "%" format codes and the strftime(3) man page for the full list.

In Python 3 this can be done in 2 steps:

1. Convert timestring to datetime object
2. Multiply the timestamp of the datetime object by 1000 to convert it to milliseconds.

For example like this:

from datetime import datetime

dt_obj = datetime.strptime('20.12.2016 09:38:42,76',
                           '%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S,%f')
millisec = dt_obj.timestamp() * 1000

print(millisec)

Output:

1482223122760.0

strptime accepts your timestring and a format string as input. The timestring (first argument) specifies what you actually want to convert to a datetime object. The format string (second argument) specifies the actual format of the string that you have passed.

Here is the explanation of the format specifiers from the official documentation:

• %d - Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %m - Month as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %Y - Year with century as a decimal number
• %H - Hour (24-hour clock) as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %M - Minute as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %S - Second as a zero-padded decimal number.
• %f - Microsecond as a decimal number, zero-padded to 6 digits.

Just convert it to timestamp

datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(ms/1000.0)

It appears to me that the simplest way to do this is

import datetime

epoch = datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(0)

def unix_time_millis(dt):
    return (dt - epoch).total_seconds() * 1000.0