Java 8: Difference between two LocalDateTime in multiple units

Question

I am trying to calculate the difference between two LocalDateTime.

The output needs to be of the format y years m months d days h hours m minutes

Answer 1

Joda-Time

Since many of the answers required API 26 support and my min API was 23, I solved it by below code :

import org.joda.time.Days

LocalDate startDate = Something
LocalDate endDate = Something
// The difference would be exclusive of both dates, 
// so in most of use cases we may need to increment it by 1
Days.daysBetween(startDate, endDate).days

Answer 2

Here a single example using Duration and TimeUnit to get 'hh:mm:ss' format.

Duration dur = Duration.between(localDateTimeIni, localDateTimeEnd);
long millis = dur.toMillis();

String.format("%02d:%02d:%02d", 
        TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toHours(millis),
        TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toMinutes(millis) - 
        TimeUnit.HOURS.toMinutes(TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toHours(millis)),
        TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toSeconds(millis) - 
        TimeUnit.MINUTES.toSeconds(TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toMinutes(millis)));

Answer 3

I found the best way to do this is with ChronoUnit.

long minutes = ChronoUnit.MINUTES.between(fromDate, toDate);
long hours = ChronoUnit.HOURS.between(fromDate, toDate);

Additional documentation is here: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/datetime/iso/period.html

Answer 4

After more than five years I answer my question. I think that the problem with a negative duration can be solved by a simple correction:

LocalDateTime fromDateTime = LocalDateTime.of(2014, 9, 9, 7, 46, 45);
LocalDateTime toDateTime = LocalDateTime.of(2014, 9, 10, 6, 46, 45);

Period period = Period.between(fromDateTime.toLocalDate(), toDateTime.toLocalDate());
Duration duration = Duration.between(fromDateTime.toLocalTime(), toDateTime.toLocalTime());

if (duration.isNegative()) {
    period = period.minusDays(1);
    duration = duration.plusDays(1);
}
long seconds = duration.getSeconds();
long hours = seconds / SECONDS_PER_HOUR;
long minutes = ((seconds % SECONDS_PER_HOUR) / SECONDS_PER_MINUTE);
long secs = (seconds % SECONDS_PER_MINUTE);
long time[] = {hours, minutes, secs};
System.out.println(period.getYears() + " years "
            + period.getMonths() + " months "
            + period.getDays() + " days "
            + time[0] + " hours "
            + time[1] + " minutes "
            + time[2] + " seconds.");

Note: The site https://www.epochconverter.com/date-difference now correctly calculates the time difference.

Thank you all for your discussion and suggestions.

Answer 5

Here is a very simple answer to your question. It works.

import java.time.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
import java.time.temporal.ChronoUnit;

public class MyClass {
public static void main(String args[]) {
    DateTimeFormatter T = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm");
    Scanner h = new Scanner(System.in);

    System.out.print("Enter date of birth[dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm]: ");
    String b = h.nextLine();

    LocalDateTime bd = LocalDateTime.parse(b,T);
    LocalDateTime cd = LocalDateTime.now();

    long minutes = ChronoUnit.MINUTES.between(bd, cd);
    long hours = ChronoUnit.HOURS.between(bd, cd);

    System.out.print("Age is: "+hours+ " hours, or " +minutes+ " minutes old");
}
}

Answer 6

And the version of @Thomas in Groovy with takes the desired units in a list instead of hardcoding the values. This implementation (which can easily ported to Java - I made the function declaration explicit) makes Thomas approach more reuseable.

def fromDateTime = LocalDateTime.of(1968, 6, 14, 0, 13, 0)
def toDateTime = LocalDateTime.now()
def listOfUnits = [
    ChronoUnit.YEARS, ChronoUnit.MONTHS, ChronoUnit.DAYS,
    ChronoUnit.HOURS, ChronoUnit.MINUTES, ChronoUnit.SECONDS,
    ChronoUnit.MILLIS]

println calcDurationInTextualForm(listOfUnits, fromDateTime, toDateTime)    

String calcDurationInTextualForm(List<ChronoUnit> listOfUnits, LocalDateTime ts, LocalDateTime to)
{
    def result = []

    listOfUnits.each { chronoUnit ->
        long amount = ts.until(to, chronoUnit)
        ts = ts.plus(amount, chronoUnit)

        if (amount) {
            result << "$amount ${chronoUnit.toString()}"
        }
    }

    result.join(', ')
}

At the time of this writing,the code above returns 47 Years, 8 Months, 9 Days, 22 Hours, 52 Minutes, 7 Seconds, 140 Millis. And, for @Gennady Kolomoets input, the code returns 23 Hours.

When you provide a list of units it must be sorted by size of the units (biggest first):

def listOfUnits = [ChronoUnit.WEEKS, ChronoUnit.DAYS, ChronoUnit.HOURS]
// returns 2495 Weeks, 3 Days, 8 Hours