Removing time from a Date object?

Question

I want to remove time from Date object.

DateFormat df;
String date;
df = new SimpleDateFormat(\"dd/MM/yyyy\");
d = eventList.get(0).getStartDate         


        

Answer 1

java.util.Date represents a date/time down to milliseconds. You don't have an option but to include a time with it. You could try zeroing out the time, but then timezones and daylight savings will come into play--and that can screw things up down the line (e.g. 21/03/2012 0:00 GMT is 20/03/2012 PDT).

What you might want is a java.sql.Date to represent only the date portion (though internally it still uses ms).

Answer 2

What about this:

    Date today = new Date();
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");

    today = sdf.parse(sdf.format(today));

Answer 3

May be the below code may help people who are looking for zeroHour of the day :

    Date todayDate = new Date();
    GregorianCalendar todayDate_G = new GregorianCalendar();
    gcd.setTime(currentDate);
    int _Day    = todayDate_GC.get(GregorianCalendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);
    int _Month  = todayDate_GC.get(GregorianCalendar.MONTH);
    int _Year   = todayDate_GC.get(GregorianCalendar.YEAR);

    GregorianCalendar newDate = new GregorianCalendar(_Year,_Month,_Day,0,0,0);
    zeroHourDate = newDate.getTime();
    long zeroHourDateTime = newDate.getTimeInMillis();

Hope this will be helpful.

Answer 4

The quick answer is :

No, you are not allowed to do that. Because that is what Date use for.

From javadoc of Date :

The class Date represents a specific instant in time, with millisecond precision.

However, since this class is simply a data object. It dose not care about how we describe it. When we see a date 2012/01/01 12:05:10.321, we can say it is 2012/01/01, this is what you need. There are many ways to do this.

Example 1 : by manipulating string

Input string : 2012/01/20 12:05:10.321

Desired output string : 2012/01/20

Since the yyyy/MM/dd are exactly what we need, we can simply manipulate the string to get the result.

String input = "2012/01/20 12:05:10.321";
String output = input.substring(0, 10);  // Output : 2012/01/20

Example 2 : by SimpleDateFormat

Input string : 2012/01/20 12:05:10.321

Desired output string : 01/20/2012

In this case we want a different format.

String input = "2012/01/20 12:05:10.321";
DateFormat inputFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
Date date = inputFormatter.parse(input);

DateFormat outputFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
String output = outputFormatter.format(date); // Output : 01/20/2012

For usage of SimpleDateFormat, check SimpleDateFormat JavaDoc.

Answer 5

You can also manually change the time part of date and format in "dd/mm/yyyy" pattern according to your requirement.

  public static Date getZeroTimeDate(Date changeDate){

        Date returnDate=new Date(changeDate.getTime()-(24*60*60*1000));
        return returnDate;
    }

If the return value is not working then check for the context parameter in web.xml. eg.

   <context-param> 
        <param-name>javax.faces.DATETIMECONVERTER_DEFAULT_TIMEZONE_IS_SYSTEM_TIMEZONE</param-name>
        <param-value>true</param-value>
    </context-param>

Answer 6

In addtition to what @jseals has already said. I think the org.apache.commons.lang.time.DateUtils class is probably what you should be looking at.

It's method : truncate(Date date,int field) worked very well for me.

JavaDocs : https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/javadocs/api-2.6/org/apache/commons/lang/time/DateUtils.html#truncate(java.util.Date, int)

Since you needed to truncate all the time fields you can use :

DateUtils.truncate(new Date(),Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH)