Calculating days between two dates with Java

Question

I want a Java program that calculates days between two dates.

1. Type the first date (German notation; with whitespaces: \"dd mm yyyy\")
2. Type the second

Answer 1

In Java 8, you could accomplish this by using LocalDate and DateTimeFormatter. From the Javadoc of LocalDate:

LocalDate is an immutable date-time object that represents a date, often viewed as year-month-day.

And the pattern can be constructed using DateTimeFormatter. Here is the Javadoc, and the relevant pattern characters I used:

Symbol - Meaning - Presentation - Examples

y - year-of-era - year - 2004; 04

M/L - month-of-year - number/text - 7; 07; Jul; July; J

d - day-of-month - number - 10

Here is the example:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
import java.time.temporal.ChronoUnit;

public class Java8DateExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        final DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd MM yyyy");
        final BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
        final String firstInput = reader.readLine();
        final String secondInput = reader.readLine();
        final LocalDate firstDate = LocalDate.parse(firstInput, formatter);
        final LocalDate secondDate = LocalDate.parse(secondInput, formatter);
        final long days = ChronoUnit.DAYS.between(firstDate, secondDate);
        System.out.println("Days between: " + days);
    }
}

Example input/output with more recent last:

23 01 1997
27 04 1997
Days between: 94

With more recent first:

27 04 1997
23 01 1997
Days between: -94

Well, you could do it as a method in a simpler way:

public static long betweenDates(Date firstDate, Date secondDate) throws IOException
{
    return ChronoUnit.DAYS.between(firstDate.toInstant(), secondDate.toInstant());
}