Getting and Playing with Date in Java

Many people have been finding it difficult to format dates and have been creating parsers to format date strings.This post unleashes how a java inbuilt mechanism can be used to format date


/*
* ShowToday.java
*
* Created on March 31, 2006, 2:06 PM
*
* To change this template, choose Tools | Template Manager
* and open the template in the editor.
*/

package learning;

/**
*
* @author AshwinK
*/
import java.util.*;
import java.text.*;

public class GetToday {
public static void main(String args[]) {
GetToday gt = new GetToday();
gt.test();
}
public void test() {
System.out.println(testDateFormat("dd MMMMM yyyy"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("yyyyMMdd"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("dd.MM.yy"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("MM/dd/yy"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("yyyy.MM.dd G 'at' hh:mm:ss z"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("EEE, MMM d, ''yy"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("h:mm a"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("H:mm:ss:SSS"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("K:mm a,z"));
System.out.println(testDateFormat("yyyy.MMMMM.dd GGG hh:mm aaa"));
}

public String testDateFormat (String format) {
Date today = new Date();
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat(format);
String datenewformat = formatter.format(today);
return datenewformat;
}
}


Java assign's each alphabet to corresponding date part for example

y -- Year
M -- Month
d -- Day
h -- Hour
m -- Minute
s -- Second

if we give format as yyyymmddhhmmss and date is 2005-04-12 12:12:12

output would be like 20050412121212

If any doubt's mail me at ashwin.rayaprolu@gmail.com