Is it possible to get milliseconds from Python 3's native time library? - python-3.x

Question

I have been trying to find a nice way to format a timestamp of the current date & time with milliseconds using Python 3's native time library.
However there's no directive for milliseconds in the standard documentation https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html#time.strftime.
There's undocumented directives though, like %s which will give the unix timestamp. Is there any other directives like this?
Code example:
>>> import time
>>> time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %s')
'2017-08-28 09:27:04 1503912424'
Ideally I would just want to change the trailing %s to some directive for milliseconds.
I'm using Python 3.x.
I'm fully aware that it's quite simple to get milliseconds using the native datetime library, however I'm looking for a solution using the native time library solely.

Answer 1

If you insist on using time only:
miliSeconds = time.time()%1*1000
time() returns accurately the time since the epoch. Since you already have the the date up to a second, you don't really care this is a time delta, since the remaining fraction is what you need to add anyway to what you have already to get the accurate date. %1 retrieves the fraction and then I convert the numbers to millisecond by multiplying by 1000.
note
Note that even though the time is always returned as a floating point
number, not all systems provide time with a better precision than 1
second. While this function normally returns non-decreasing values, it
can return a lower value than a previous call if the system clock has
been set back between the two calls.
Taken from https://docs.python.org/3/library/time.html#time.time. But this means there is no way to do what you want. You may be able to do something more robust with process_time, but that would have to be elaborate.