4 examples to convert Date to LocalDate in Java 8?

One of the challenge you will face while using new Java 8 Date and time API, JSR-310 in existing Java application is the conversion between java.util.Date and java.time.LocalDate and other classes. Even though library has everything you would expect, it doesn't have a direct conversion method between old Date and new LocalDate. There is a reason for it, eventhough java.util.Date says its a date its not, becuase its just a millisecond value since midnight at the start of 1970 GMT. It's equivalent to Instant class in new Java Date API and that's why you have a direct conversion method between Date and Instant in Java 8. Anyway, its not hard to convert a java.util.Date to java.time.LocalDate in Java 8, in fact there are multiple ways which we will explore in this tutorial. 

5 Reasons Why Java's old Date and Calendar API was a Bad Design

If you have been programming in Java for a couple of years then you may know that how bad was Java's Date and Calendar API was, I mean the java.util.Date and java.utill.Calendar was badly designed. Though Java has corrected it's a mistake by introducing a brand new, shiny Date and Time API, not many Java developers are using it yet. In a bit to motivate you to use new Date and Time API from Java 8, I am going to list down a couple of reasons why Java's Date and Calendar class has been criticized so much in the past.  These points are also important to know from the Interview point of view because as an experienced Java programmer, it is expected from you to know the shortcomings of the existing API and how new API solves those problems.

5 Examples to Compare two Dates in Java?

Comparing dates in Java is a common task for Java programmers, now and then we need to compare two dates to check whether two dates are equals, less than, or greater than each other, sometimes we also need to check if one date comes in between two dates. Java provides multiple ways to compare two Dates in Java which is capable of performing Date comparison and letting you know whether two dates are the same, one date comes before or after another date in Java. By the way, when you compare dates, make sure to consider timezones, day light saving time, and precision. 

How to get current Date Timestamps in Java on GMT or Local Timezone? Example Tutorial

Getting current data and timestamps in java is a requirement for most java enterprise applications. The formatting date in java or parsing date in Java is such a common functionality that you will need it now and then. Though most of the programmers look at Google for finding current date and timestamps code in Java, it's worth to have an idea how you can do that by using java.util.Date class. sometimes you might need formatted data string say "yyyy-MM--dd:HH:mm:ss".

How to convert java.sql.Date to java.util.Date in Java - JDBC Example

You often need to convert java.sql.Date to java.util.Date while interacting with databases from Java application. Since JDBC the Java API for database connectivity uses java.sql.Date to represent and most of the java code accepts java.util.Date, you have no choice but to convert SQL date to util date in Java. Though, there is some fundamental difference between them e.g. java.sql.Date only contains date part e.g. day, month, and year, it doesn't contain any time attributes, but java.util.Date contains both date and time attributes e.g. hour, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. So, when you convert a java.sql.Date to java.util.Date, the resultant java.util.Date instance has the time part as zero i.e 00:00:00 to reflect midnight.

SimpleDateFormat in Java is not Thread-Safe Use Carefully

SimpleDateFormat in Java is a very common class and often used to format Date to String and parse String into Date in Java, especially in pre Java 8 world, but it can cause very subtle and hard to debug issues if not used carefully because both DateFormat and SimpleDateFormat both are not thread-safe and buggy. A call to format() and parse() method mutate the state of DateFormat class and should be synchronized externally in order to avoid any issue but many Java developers are not aware of these. That's why it's better to completely avoid using SimpleDateFormat class especially if you are using Java Se 8 or higher version like Java SE 11 or Java SE 17. here are a few points which you should take care while using SimpleDateFormat in Java:

Why Timestamp cannot be used in place of Date in Java? Example

One of the tricky questions from the Java Interview is, "Can we pass a Timestamp instance to a method expecting java.util.Date?", it's a tricky question because the answer is both Yes and No. You can, of course, pass a Timestamp object to a method with the argument as Date because first, Timestamp is a subclass of java.util.Date and second it contains both date and time values which are missing in either java.sql.Date and java.sql.Time. So there is more reason to pass a Timestamp value to Date but you should not be doing that. Why? because Timestamp is not exactly Date.

6 Subtle Date and Calendar Details to Learn before using Date in Java - Example Tutorial

Hello guys, to appreciate the brilliance of the new Date and Time API introduced in Java 8, you must remember the nasty problems you have earlier faced with Java's old Date and Calendar API Well, I have been using Java for the last 20 years and I have to face them so I thought to write this article to educate Java programmers about the shortcomings of old Java Date and Calendar API. Another reason for this article is that even though Java is ready with the new, shiny, and carefully designed Date and time API, your project is probably not. Most of the prominent organizations that use Java at large scales, like Investment banks, Insurance companies, major E-commerce giants, are quite reluctant to upgrade. There are many firms, both big and small that are still running on Java 5 and expect to migrate to Java 6 in a couple of years.

How to find number of days between two dates in Java 8 [LocalDate until() & between() Example ]

You can use the LocalDate.between() method to find the number of days between two dates in Java. This method is full proof and takes care of date-time nuisances like leap year and daylight saving time. Before Java 8, it was really difficult to calculate the number of days between two dates in Java. Though old Date and Calendar API provides methods to compare two dates like equals(), before(), and after(), no method can tell the exact difference in days or months between two dates unless you are using the joda-time library. All that is over now. You can now do better date-time arithmetic using Java 8 Date and Time API.

How to convert Milliseconds to Minutes and Seconds in Java? TimeUnit Example Tutorial

I used to convert milliseconds to seconds in Java by simply dividing it by 1000, and then into minutes by further dividing it by 60, and then hours by even further dividing by 60 and so on. This works but its not the most elegant way to convert millisecond into hours, minutes, seconds or other time unit. JDK comes with a nice utility class called TimeUnit, which as its name suggest, allow you to convert one time unit into other. So if you have milliseconds e.g. execution time of a method and you want to convert into minutes and seconds to improve readability, you can use TimeUnit.toSeconds() and TimeUnit.toMinutes() methods. 

How to convert java.util.Date to java.sql.Date - JDBC Example

You often need to convert java.util.Date to java.sql.Date if you are storing dates in a database e.g. SQL SERVER or MySQL. Since JDBC has their own data types for date and time e.g. java.sql.Date, java.sql.Time and java.sql.TimeStamp to match with database date, time and date-time types, you cannot pass a java.util.Date directly. All methods which are supposed to store dates e.g. setDate(paramName, paramValue) expects java.sql.Date, so it becomes essential to know how to convert java.util.Date to java.sql.Date in JDBC. You would be surprised to know that java.sql.Date is a subclass of java.util.Date and all it does is suppress or remove time-related fields from java.util.Date.

How to convert String to Date in Java - SimpleDateFormat Example

Hello Java developers, you may know that SimpleDateFormat in Java can be used to convert String to Date in Java. java.text.SimpleDateFormat is an implementation of DateFormat which defines a date pattern and can convert a particular String that follows that pattern into Date in Java. This is the second part of the article on java.util.Date and String in Java. In the first part, we have seen How to convert Date to String in Java. SimpleDateFormat accepts a String in any date format e.g. yyyyMMdd is a date pattern and  20220924 is a String in that format. Now you want to create a java.util.Date object from this String.

How to Convert Date to String in Java with Example

As a Java developer we often need to convert java.util.Date or LocalDate to String in Java for  displaying purpose or sending Date as String in JSON or XML messages and that's where having a agree upon Date Format is very important. It easily allows you to convert your Date as String and pass between two System. I need it that while working on displaying date in my application and then I thought about this article to list down various way of converting this in various ways after some reading I found that SimpleDateFormat makes this quite easy. 

How to convert Date to LocalDate and LocalDateTime in Java 8 - Example Tutorial

The easiest way to convert a java.util.Date to java.time.LocalDate is via Instant, which is the equivalent class of java.util.Date in JDK 8. You can first convert util Date to Instant and then create a LocalDateTime object from that instant at your default timezone. Once you have an instant of LocalDateTime, you can easily convert that to LocalDate or LocalTime in Java. If you are not living under the rock in the last two years that its 2016 and Java 8 has been around for more than 2 years, 18th March 2014 Java SE 8 GA happened.

17 Examples of Calendar and Date in Java - Tutorial

The java.util.Calendar class was added in Java on JDK 1.4 in an attempt to fix some flaws of the java.util.Date class. It did make some tasks simpler, e.g. create an arbitrary date comes easier using the new GregorianCalendar(2016, Calendar.JUNE, 11) constructor, as opposed to the Date class where the year starts from 1900 and the Month was starting from zero. It didn't solve all the problems like mutability and thread-safety of Date class still remains, but it does make life easier at that time. Now with Java 8 everything related to Date and Time has become super easy and consistent but unfortunately, it will take another 5 to 10 years before the older version of Java goes away. Don't believe me, there are still applications running on JDK 1.5 which was released 12 years ago. The bottom line is it's still important to know about the Date and Calendar in Java.

How to format/parse dates with LocalDateTime in Java 8 - Example Tutorial

One of the common tasks in a Java project is formatting or parsing data to String and vice-versa. Parsing date means you have a String that represents a date like "2017-08-3" and you want to convert it into an object which represents the date in Java, like java.util.Date in pre-Java 8 world and LocalDate or LocalDatetime in Java 8 world. Similarly, formatting a date means converting a date instance into a String, for example, you have a Date object or LocalDatetime object and you want a String in dd-MM-yyyy format. Java 8 API provides good support for formatting and parsing dates.

Difference between Period and Duration class in Java 8? [Example]

What is the difference between Period and Duration class in Java is one of the popular Java 8 interview questions and has been asked too many of my readers recently. If you were also wondering the difference between Period vs Duration and when to use Period over Duration and vice-versa then you have come to the right place. Java 8 has two classes to represent differences in time like Duration and Period. The main difference between Period and Duration is that they represent the difference in different units, A Duration is used to calculate time difference using time-based values (seconds, millisecond, or hours) but Period is used to measure the amount of time in date-based values like days, months and year.

How to Calculate Difference between two Dates in Java (In Days) - Example Tutorial

If you are not running on Java 8, then there are two ways to calculate the difference between two dates in Java in days, either by using standard JDK classes e.g. java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar or by using the joda-time library. Unfortunately, Java's old Date and Calendar API is buggy and not intuitive, so many of us by default use Joda for all date and time arithmetic. In this example, you will learn how to find the number of days between today and any date entered by a user using Joda, as well as without using any third-party library. When I first time face this problem, I thought what's a big deal about finding the difference between dates? If you can convert Date to milliseconds then finding a number of days, months or years are just a matter of simple arithmetic, but I was WRONG. I was not thinking about the real-world date and time nuisance like leap seconds, leap years, and daylight saving time.

Java 8 Date Time - 20 Examples of LocalDate, LocalTime, LocalDateTime

Along with lambda expressions, streams, and several minor goodies, Java 8 has also introduced brand new Date and Time API, and in this tutorial, we will learn how to use Java 8 Date Time API with simple how-to-do task examples. Java's handling of Date, Calendar, and Time is long been criticized by the community, which is not helped by Java's decision of making java.util.Date mutable and SimpleDateFormat not thread-safe. It seems, Java has realized a need for better Date and time support, which is good for a community which already used to of Joda Date and Time API.

How to create LocalDateTime in Java 8 - Example Tutorial

The LocalDateTime is a new class introduced in Java 8 new Date and Time API. This class is in java.time package and it represents both date and time information without timezone. In this example, you will learn different ways to create an instance of LocalDateTime class in Java 8 like by using the static factory method, or by combining LocalDate and LocalTime instances together, which are subsequently used to denote date without time and time without the date in Java 8. As their name suggests they are local, so they don't contain timezone information.