Dates and time

Intro

• This is based on the "Java Internationalization" book
• Dates come in many formats, even in the US: 10/4/99; October 4, 1999; 4 Oct 99; etc
• In different languages and locales these are expressed differently e.g. 4 octobre 1999 in France
• The names of the days and months change
• Capitalisation rules differ: January in English, janvier in French
• Order of components varies: day/month in Aus, month/day in the US

DateFormat class

• The standard Java class for handling dates in different locales
• The static method DateFormat.getDateInstance() will get a date format object
• The parameters are the date format (short, medium, long, full) and a locale

  
        DateFormat df = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.FULL, Locale.FRANCE);
        

• To get a formatted string out of this, pass in a Date object to format()

  
        String result =  df.format(new Date());
        

Times

• The same class is used to format times using DateFormat.getTimeInstance()
• ... and get both a time and date formatter by DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance()

Calendar

Parsing dates

• Input streams can be parsed for a date using DateFormatter.parse()

Defining your own format

Calendars

Time zones