I want to get Year, Month, Day, etc from Java Date to compare with Gregorian Calendar date in Java. Is this possible?

I have a Date object in Java stored as Java's Date type.

I also have a Gregorian Calendar created date. The gregorian calendar date has no parameters and therefore is an instance of today's date (and time?).

With the java date, I want to be able to get the year, month, day, hour, minute, and seconds from the java date type and compare the the gregoriancalendar date.

I saw that at the moment the Java date is stored as a long and the only methods available seem to just write the long as a formatted date string. Is there a way to access Year, month, day, etc?

I saw that the getYear(), getMonth(), etc. methods for Date class have been deprecated. I was wondering what's the best practice to use the Java Date instance I have with the GregorianCalendar date.

My end goal is to do a date calculation so that I can check that the Java date is within so many hours, minutes etc of today's date and time.

I'm still a newbie to Java and am getting a bit puzzled by this.

Solution 1:

Use something like:

Date date; // your date
// Choose time zone in which you want to interpret your Date
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Paris"));
cal.setTime(date);
int year = cal.get(Calendar.YEAR);
int month = cal.get(Calendar.MONTH);
int day = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);
// etc.

Beware, months start at 0, not 1.

Edit: Since Java 8 it's better to use java.time.LocalDate rather than java.util.Calendar. See this answer for how to do it.

Solution 2:

With Java 8 and later, you can convert the Date object to a LocalDate object and then easily get the year, month and day.

Date date = new Date();
LocalDate localDate = date.toInstant().atZone(ZoneId.systemDefault()).toLocalDate();
int year  = localDate.getYear();
int month = localDate.getMonthValue();
int day   = localDate.getDayOfMonth();

Note that getMonthValue() returns an int value from 1 to 12.

Solution 3:

    Date date = new Date();

    SimpleDateFormat simpleDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("EEEE");

    System.out.println("DAY "+simpleDateFormat.format(date).toUpperCase());

    simpleDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MMMM");
    System.out.println("MONTH "+simpleDateFormat.format(date).toUpperCase());

    simpleDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("YYYY");
    System.out.println("YEAR "+simpleDateFormat.format(date).toUpperCase());

EDIT: The output for date = Fri Jun 15 09:20:21 CEST 2018 is:

DAY FRIDAY
MONTH JUNE
YEAR 2018

Solution 4:

You could do something like this, it will explain how the Date class works.

String currentDateString = "02/27/2012 17:00:00";
SimpleDateFormat sd = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss");
Date currentDate = sd.parse(currentDateString);

String yourDateString = "02/28/2012 15:00:00";
SimpleDateFormat yourDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss");

Date yourDate = yourDateFormat.parse(yourDateString);

if (yourDate.after(currentDate)) {
    System.out.println("After");
} else if(yourDate.equals(currentDate)) {
    System.out.println("Same");
} else {
    System.out.println("Before");
}