Technofriends

Often, we wish to Format the Date and Time information into a given format, either for displaying the same to the end user or for further processing. Java contains formatting classes which can be used to format a date into a desired format. The most commonly used class for formatting dates is the SimpleDateFormat class.

The SimpleDateFormat class takes format string as input to its constructor and returns a format object which can then be used to format Date objects. Calling the format() method of the SimpleDateFormat object will return a string that contains the formatted representation of the Date that is passed into the method as a parameter.

The table below contains Time and Date Format Codes which can be used to format the Date Object.

Letter	Date or Time Component	Presentation	Examples
G	Era designator	Text	AD
y	Year	Year	1996; 96
M	Month in year	Month	July; Jul; 07
w	Week in year	Number	27
W	Week in month	Number	2
D	Day in year	Number	189
d	Day in month	Number	10
F	Day of week in month	Number	2
E	Day in week	Text	Tuesday; Tue
a	Am/pm marker	Text	PM
H	Hour in day (0-23)	Number	0
k	Hour in day (1-24)	Number	24
K	Hour in am/pm (0-11)	Number	0
h	Hour in am/pm (1-12)	Number	12
m	Minute in hour	Number	30
s	Second in minute	Number	55
S	Millisecond	Number	978
z	Time zone	General time zone	Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z	Time zone	RFC 822 time zone	-0800

Lets try understanding this better using this code example. The code below formats today’s date.

package testapplicationsfortechnofriends;
import java.util.Date;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
/**
*
* @author Vaibhav
*/
public class Main {

/**
* @param args the command line arguments
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
// TODO code application logic here
Date todaysDate = new java.util.Date();
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat(“EEE, dd-MMM-yyyy HH:mm:ss”);

String formattedDate = formatter.format(todaysDate);
System.out.println(“Today’s date and Time is:”+formattedDate);

}

}

Running this program, gives the following output

Today’s date and Time is:Thu, 01-May-2008 14:39:45

For further information on this, follow the Sun Java Documentation on DateFormat and SImpleDateFormat class.

Also read:Understanding Polymorphism in Java : Part 1

Understanding Polymorphism in Java : Part 2

What is the difference between JDK and JRE?

An introduction to JDBC Drivers

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Cheers

Vaibhav

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