Convert a Date object to Ticks using JavaScript

Convert a Date object to Ticks using JavaScript #

To convert a date object to ticks:

1. Use the getTime() method on the date to get the number of milliseconds since the Unix Epoch.
2. Multiply the timestamp by the number of ticks in a millisecond (10,000).
3. Add the epoch offset to the result.

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function dateToTicks(date) {
  const epochOffset = 621355968000000000;
  const ticksPerMillisecond = 10000;

  const ticks = date.getTime() * ticksPerMillisecond + epochOffset;

  return ticks;
}

console.log(dateToTicks(new Date()));

console.log(dateToTicks(new Date('2022-01-20')));

We created a reusable function, which takes a Date object as a parameter and converts it to universal ticks.

A single tick represents one hundred nanoseconds.

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const millisecondsSinceEpoch = new Date('2022-01-20').getTime();
console.log(millisecondsSinceEpoch); // 👉️ 16426368000000

In our function, we stored the epoch offset in a variable. This is the number of nanoseconds between the 1st of January 0001 and the 1st of January 1970.

The second variable ticksPerMillisecond stores the number of .net ticks there are in a millisecond (10,000).

The getTime() method returns the number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch, so multiplying the value by the number of ticks in 1 millisecond (10,000) gives us the number of ticks since Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC.

Adding the epoch offset to the result gives us the total number of ticks since the 1st of January 0001.