Using time.time():

import time

def current_milli_time():
    return round(time.time() * 1000)

Then:

>>> current_milli_time()
1378761833768

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.

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

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.

What about:

datetime.now().strftime('%M:%S.%f')[:-4]

I'm not sure what you mean by "Milliseconds only 2 digits", but this should keep it to 2 decimal places. There may be a more elegant way by manipulating the strftime format string to cut down on the precision as well -- I'm not completely sure.

EDIT

If the %f modifier doesn't work for you, you can try something like:

now=datetime.now()
string_i_want=('%02d:%02d.%d'%(now.minute,now.second,now.microsecond))[:-4]

Again, I'm assuming you just want to truncate the precision.

If you want to format a datetime object in a specific format that is different from the standard format, it's best to explicitly specify that format:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
'2011-11-03 18:21:26'

See the documentation of datetime.strftime() for an explanation of the % directives.

Starting from Python 3.6, the isoformat() method is flexible enough to also produce this format:

datetime.datetime.now().isoformat(sep=" ", timespec="seconds")