How to get the current date and time

Question

How do I get the current date and time in Java?

I am looking for something that is equivalent to DateTime.Now from C#.

Answer 1

Just construct a new Date object without any arguments; this will assign the current date and time to the new object.

import java.util.Date;

Date d = new Date();

In the words of the Javadocs for the zero-argument constructor:

Allocates a Date object and initializes it so that it represents the time at which it was allocated, measured to the nearest millisecond.

Make sure you're using java.util.Date and not java.sql.Date -- the latter doesn't have a zero-arg constructor, and has somewhat different semantics that are the topic of an entirely different conversation. :)

Answer 2

java.lang.System.currentTimeMillis(); will return the datetime since the epoch

Answer 3

In Java 8 it's:

ZonedDateTime dateTime = ZonedDateTime.now();

Answer 4

The Java Date and Calendar classes are considered by many to be poorly designed. You should take a look at Joda Time, a library commonly used in lieu of Java's built-in date libraries.

The equivalent of DateTime.Now in Joda Time is:

DateTime dt = new DateTime();

Update

As noted in the comments, the latest versions of Joda Time have a DateTime.now() method, so:

DateTime dt = DateTime.now();

Answer 5

import java.util.Date;   
Date now = new Date();

Note that the Date object is mutable and if you want to do anything sophisticated, use jodatime.

Answer 6

import org.joda.time.DateTime;

DateTime now = DateTime.now();