How to get the current date and time of your timezone in Java?

Question

I have my app hosted in a London Server. I am in Madrid, Spain. So the timezone is -2 hours.

How can I obtain the current date / time with my time zone.

Date curr_date = new Date(System.currentTimeMillis());

e.g.

Date curr_date = new Date(System.currentTimeMillis("MAD_TIMEZONE"));

With JODA

DateTimeZone zone = DateTimeZone.forID("Europe/Madrid");
DateTime dt = new DateTime(zone);
int day = dt.getDayOfMonth();
int year = dt.getYear();
int month = dt.getMonthOfYear();
int hours = dt.getHourOfDay();
int minutes = dt.getMinuteOfHour();

Answer 1

Date is always UTC-based. There's no notion of a "local instance of Date." Use Date in conjunction with Calendar and/or TimeZone.getDefault() to use a "local" time zone. Use TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Madrid") to get the Madrid time zone.

... or use Joda Time, which tends to make the whole thing clearer, IMO.

Answer 2

You would use JodaTime for that. Java.util.Date is very limited regarding TimeZone.

Answer 3

using Calendar is simple:

Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Madrid"));
Date currentDate = calendar.getTime();

Answer 4

Here is an example:

Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getDefault());
Date date = c.getTime();

Answer 5

As Jon Skeet already said, java.util.Date does not have a time zone. A Date object represents a number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 12:00 AM, UTC. It does not contain time zone information.

When you format a Date object into a string, for example by using SimpleDateFormat, then you can set the time zone on the DateFormat object to let it know in which time zone you want to display the date and time:

Date date = new Date();
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");

// Use Madrid's time zone to format the date in
df.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Madrid"));

System.out.println("Date and time in Madrid: " + df.format(date));

If you want the local time zone of the computer that your program is running on, use:

df.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getDefault());