Java Calendar date error

Question

Can anyone please help me understand why I am getting different month values for

SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(\"dd/MM/yyyy\");    
Syst         


        

Answer 1

The other answers are correct. The java.util.Calendar class uses zero-based counting for month numbers. One of many reasons to avoid using the java.util.Date/Calendar classes.

This kind of work is easier with the Joda-Time 2.3 library. Thankfully it sensibly uses one-based counting such as January = 1, December = 12.

java.util.Calendar cal = java.util.Calendar.getInstance();

// Though not required here for this one purpose, it's better to specify a time zone than rely on default.
DateTimeZone timeZone = DateTimeZone.forID( "America/Montreal" );
DateTime dateTime = new DateTime( cal.getTime(), timeZone );

// Extract month. Note how these two lines call similar sounding methods that are actually quite different.
// One returns a primitive int value. The other returns an object of nested class DateTime.Property.
int monthNumber = dateTime.getMonthOfYear();
String monthName = dateTime.monthOfYear().getAsText( Locale.FRENCH );

Dump to console…

System.out.println( "dateTime: " + dateTime );
System.out.println( "monthNumber: " + monthNumber );
System.out.println( "monthName: " + monthName );

When run…

dateTime: 2014-02-10T02:58:35.386-05:00
monthNumber: 2
monthName: février