java.util.Date has no specific time zone, although its value is most commonly thought of in relation to UTC. What makes you think it's in local time?
To be precise: the value within a java.util.Date is the number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch, which occurred at midnight January 1st 1970, UTC. The same epoch could also be described in other time zones, but the traditional description is in terms of UTC. As it's a number of milliseconds since a fixed epoch, the value within java.util.Date is the same around the world at any particular instant, regardless of local time zone.
I suspect the problem is that you're displaying it via an instance of Calendar which uses the local timezone, or possibly using Date.toString() which also uses the local timezone, or a SimpleDateFormat instance, which, by default, also uses local timezone.
If this isn't the problem, please post some sample code.
I would, however, recommend that you use Joda-Time anyway, which offers a much clearer API.
How can I get the current date and time in UTC or GMT in Java , java.util.Date has no specific time zone, although its value is most commonly thought of in relation to UTC. What makes you think it's in local time? To be precise: Any solution that needs to get a Date or Timestamp in UTC, it looks like the key is to not re-use the SimpleDateFormat, but rather use one to get UTC into a string, then create another UTC when converting the string to either a Date or Timestamp Object.
How Can I Get the Current Date and Time in UTC or GMT in Java , When I create a new Date object, it is initialized to the current time but in the local timezone. How can I get the current date and time in GMT? 2. Current UTC Time – Java8 Instant: Java 8 brought an excellent new java.time.*package to supplement the old Java Date/Calendar classes. From Java 8 getting the UTC time as simple as creating Instant object like the following. An Instant class represents a moment of the timeline in UTC as default timezone.
SimpleDateFormat dateFormatGmt = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MMM-dd HH:mm:ss");
dateFormatGmt.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
//Local time zone
SimpleDateFormat dateFormatLocal = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MMM-dd HH:mm:ss");
//Time in GMT
return dateFormatLocal.parse( dateFormatGmt.format(new Date()) );
How to get the current UTC date using Java, One of the most fundamental questions in every programming language is the one related to time and timezones. Let's get you all the answers How can I get the current date and time in GMT? When I create a new Date object, it is initialized to the current time but in the local timezone. 6307/how-can-i-get-the-current-date-and-time-in-utc-or-gmt-in-java
This definitely returns UTC time: as String and Date objects !
static final String DATE_FORMAT = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss";
public static Date getUTCdatetimeAsDate() {
// note: doesn't check for null
return stringDateToDate(getUTCdatetimeAsString());
}
public static String getUTCdatetimeAsString() {
final SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT);
sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
final String utcTime = sdf.format(new Date());
return utcTime;
}
public static Date stringDateToDate(String StrDate) {
Date dateToReturn = null;
SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(DATEFORMAT);
try {
dateToReturn = (Date)dateFormat.parse(StrDate);
}
catch (ParseException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return dateToReturn;
}
Java Data Type How to, setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));. System.out.println("UTC Time is: " + dateFormat.format(date));. } } Output. UTC Time is: 22-01-2018 13:14:35. Amongst Java's myriad of classes is the Calendar class, which is used to convert dates and time between specific instants and the calendar fields. Getting the current date and time is really easy using a calendar: Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance (); // Returns instance with current date and time set.
Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance();
System.out.println("current: "+c.getTime());
TimeZone z = c.getTimeZone();
int offset = z.getRawOffset();
if(z.inDaylightTime(new Date())){
offset = offset + z.getDSTSavings();
}
int offsetHrs = offset / 1000 / 60 / 60;
int offsetMins = offset / 1000 / 60 % 60;
System.out.println("offset: " + offsetHrs);
System.out.println("offset: " + offsetMins);
c.add(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, (-offsetHrs));
c.add(Calendar.MINUTE, (-offsetMins));
System.out.println("GMT Time: "+c.getTime());
java.util.TimeZone.getTimeZone java code examples, Date; import java.util.TimeZone; //w ww . j av a 2s. com public class Main { public static void main (String[] args){ System.out.println(my_time_in("GMT-5:00", Using the Joda-Time 3rd-party open-source free-of-cost library, you can get the current date-time in just one line of code. Joda-Time inspired the new java.time.* classes in Java 8, but has a different architecture. You may use Joda-Time in older versions of Java.
java.util.TimeZone java code examples, How can I get the current date and time in UTC or GMT in Java? SimpleDateFormat dateFormatGmt = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MMM-dd HH:mm:ss"); Date/Timestamp will store as milliseconds from the UTC epoch internally, and is not related to a certain timezone, since timestamps are the same regardless of your timezone. If it's 10pm GMT in Honolulu, it's also 10pm GMT in New York.
Java 8 - Parse string to date-time in UTC (or GMT), How can I get the current date and time in UTC or GMT in Java? Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance(); System.out.println("current: "+c.getTime()); TimeZone z = c Current date and time in Java – Two ways to get it 1) Using Date class Specify the desired pattern while creating the instance of SimpleDateFormat. Create an object of Date class.
How do I get the current date and time using UTC or GMT in Java?, Learn to parse a given date time string to instance e.g. ZonedDateTime or OffsetDateTime classes, using DateTimeFormatter class in UTC/GMT in Java 8. System.out.println(odtInstanceAtOffset);. System.out.println(odtInstanceAtUTC);. A2A. How do I get the current UTC date using Java? Following code will helps you [code]package com.ashok.sample; import java.util.Date; import java.util.TimeZone; import java.text.SimpleDateFormat; public class CurrentUtcDate { public static void
Comments I know these types of topics are completely over discussed, but I found the commons-lang package really handles these common java issues well. commons.apache.org/lang/api-2.5/org/apache/commons/lang/time Check out the various packages they have. Which local time do you want, and to what precision. Most timezones are defined relative to UTC with a fixed offset measured in SI seconds, but the relationship of GMT which is based on solar observation and a (slightly) variable length second is more complex. The two differ by up to 0.9 seconds. A Date doesn’t hold a time zone, so "but in the local timezone" is not correct (or inaccurate at best). See All about java.util.Date . Then that's probably a driver issue. You may need to set your connection to UTC, or something like that. I've seen problems like this before, but the problem is not in java.util.Date. Behrang, according to stackoverflow.com/questions/4123534/…, the MySQL JDBC driver converts a given java.util.Timestamp (or java.util.Date) to the server time zone. @Mr. Cat: How are you determining that? Is it by writing System.out.println(new Date())? If so, you should be aware that it's the toString() method which is applying the time zone there... if that's not it, please give more details. @KanagaveluSugumar: toString() always uses the default time zone. date.getTime() definitely returns milliseconds since the Unix epoch, in UTC. It's most accurate to say that Date itself doesn't have a time zone at all - it's just an instant in time, which could be regarded in multiple time zones. But when you create an instance, it doesn't depend on your time zone. @Jemenake: Actually it didn't happen when it was midnight in Greenwich, because the UK was on UTC+1 at the time. Just one of the odd bits of history. But I take your point - it's better to say "new Date().getTime() returns the milliseconds since the Unix epoch, which was midnight at the start of January 1st 1970, UTC". So the UTC is part of pinning down the epoch to a particular instant in time, not part of the result. DateTime.now().toDateTime(DateTimeZone.UTC) was what I was looking for! Thanks!@Managarm You can shorten that to: DateTime nowUtc = DateTime.now ( DateTimeZone.UTC ) ; How to get this with Pure Java 8 2014-01-21T15:34:29.933-08:00 in the example you used new org.joda.time.DateTime() @GOXR3PLUS ZonedDateTime.now( ZoneId.of( "America/Los_Angeles" ) ).truncatedTo( ChronoUnit.MILLIS ).toOffsetDateTime().toString() We get the current moment for a specified time zone. Next, lop off any micros/nanos. Then we convert to having only a mere offset-from-UTC (number of hours-minutes-seconds) rather than a full-blown time zone (a history of past, present, and future changes in the offset used by the people of a particular region). Lastly, we generate text representing the value in that OffsetDateTime per the standard ISO 8601 format used by default in its toString method.
