Java: Difference between two dates spanning over months

Question

I have the following code that successfully gets me the difference between two days (in days, hours, minutes, seconds):

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleD         


        

Answer 1

While you should use Joda Time simply as a much better date/time API, I suspect the problem is actually just that you're parsing the values incorrectly. Use a format string of:

yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss

... with dd instead of DD. The DD value is "day in year" which I suspect is confusing things, basically overriding the month part entirely. See the SimpleDateFormat documentation for more details.

You can validate what's wrong by printing out d1 and d2 after parsing...