Get Today's date in Java at midnight time

Question

I need to create two date objects. If the current date and time is March 9th 2012 11:30 AM then

• date object d1 should be 9th March 20

Answer 1

Calendar currentDate = Calendar.getInstance(); //Get the current date
SimpleDateFormat formatter= new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MMM/dd HH:mm:ss"); //format it as per your requirement
String dateNow = formatter.format(currentDate.getTime());
System.out.println("Now the date is :=>  " + dateNow);

Answer 2

For Current Date and Time :

String mydate = java.text.DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance().format(Calendar.getInstance().getTime());

This will shown as :

Feb 5, 2013 12:40:24PM

Answer 3

Using org.apache.commons.lang3.time.DateUtils

Date pDate = new Date();
DateUtils.truncate(pDate, Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);

Answer 4

A solution in Java 8:

Date startOfToday = Date.from(ZonedDateTime.now().with(LocalTime.MIN).toInstant());

Answer 5

Here is a Java 8 way to get UTC Midnight in millis

ZonedDateTime utcTime = ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneOffset.UTC);
long todayMidnight = utcTime.toLocalDate().atStartOfDay().toEpochSecond(ZoneOffset.UTC) * 1000;

Answer 6

Defining ‘Midnight’

The word “midnight” is tricky to define.

Some think of it as the moment before a new day starts. Trying to represent that in software as tricky as the last moment of the day can always be subdivided as a smaller fraction of a second.

I suggest a better way of thinking about this is to get “first moment of the day”.

This supports the commonly used approach of defining a span of time as ‘Half-Open’, where the beginning is inclusive while the ending is exclusive. So a full day starts with the first moment of the day and runs up to, but not including, the first moment of the following day. A full day would like this (notice the date going from the 3rd to the 4th):

2016-02-03T00:00:00.0-08:00[America/Los_Angeles]/2016-02-04T00:00:00.0-08:00[America/Los_Angeles]

Joda-Time

If using the Joda-Time library, call withTimeAtStartOfDay.

Note how we specify the time zone. If omitted, the JVM’s current default time zone is implicitly applied. Better to be explicit.

DateTime todayStart = DateTime.now( DateTimeZone.forID( "America/Montreal" ) ).withTimeAtStartOfDay() ;

If using Java 8 or later, better to use the java.time package built into Java. See sibling Answer by Jens Hoffman.