I have a Date object in Java stored as Java's Date type.
I also have a Gregorian Calendar created date. The gregorian calendar date has no parameters and therefore is an instance of today's date (and time?).
With the java date, I want to be able to get the year, month, day, hour, minute, and seconds from the java date type and compare the the gregoriancalendar date.
I saw that at the moment the Java date is stored as a long and the only methods available seem to just write the long as a formatted date string. Is there a way to access Year, month, day, etc?
I saw that the getYear(), getMonth(), etc. methods for Date class have been deprecated. I was wondering what's the best practice to use the Java Date instance I have with the GregorianCalendar date.
My end goal is to do a date calculation so that I can check that the Java date is within so many hours, minutes etc of today's date and time.
I'm still a newbie to Java and am getting a bit puzzled by this.
Use something like:
Date date; // your date
// Choose time zone in which you want to interpret your Date
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Paris"));
cal.setTime(date);
int year = cal.get(Calendar.YEAR);
int month = cal.get(Calendar.MONTH);
int day = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);
// etc.
Beware, months start at 0, not 1.
Edit: Since Java 8 it's better to use java.time.LocalDate rather than java.util.Calendar. See this answer for how to do it.
With Java 8 and later, you can convert the Date object to a LocalDate object and then easily get the year, month and day.
Date date = new Date();
LocalDate localDate = date.toInstant().atZone(ZoneId.systemDefault()).toLocalDate();
int year = localDate.getYear();
int month = localDate.getMonthValue();
int day = localDate.getDayOfMonth();
Note that getMonthValue() returns an int value from 1 to 12.
You could do something like this, it will explain how the Date class works.
String currentDateString = "02/27/2012 17:00:00";
SimpleDateFormat sd = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss");
Date currentDate = sd.parse(currentDateString);
String yourDateString = "02/28/2012 15:00:00";
SimpleDateFormat yourDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss");
Date yourDate = yourDateFormat.parse(yourDateString);
if (yourDate.after(currentDate)) {
System.out.println("After");
} else if(yourDate.equals(currentDate)) {
System.out.println("Same");
} else {
System.out.println("Before");
}