Format date without year

Question

How can create text representation of some date, that takes locale into account and contains only day and month (no year)?

Following code gives me something like 23/09/2010

DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, Locale.getDefault()).format(date);

I want to get 23/09

Answer 1

DateFormat.SHORT specifies M/d/yy which is what you are getting. Use SimpleDateFormat and specify a pattern. For example:
     Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
     Date date;
     SimpleDateFormat simpleDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("M/d");

     date = calendar.getTime();
     System.out.println(simpleDateFormat.format(date));

Answer 2

I did it this way:

DateFormat dateFormat = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, Locale.getDefault());
if (dateFormat instanceof SimpleDateFormat) {
    SimpleDateFormat simpleDateFormat = (SimpleDateFormat) dateFormat;
    String pattern = simpleDateFormat.toPattern();

    // I modified the pattern here so that dd.MM.yyyy would result to dd.MM

    simpleDateFormat.applyPattern(modifiedPattern);

    ... etc
}

Answer 3

You could use regex to trim off all y's and any non-alphabetic characters before and after, if any. Here's a kickoff example:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    for (Locale locale : Locale.getAvailableLocales()) {
        DateFormat df = getShortDateInstanceWithoutYears(locale);
        System.out.println(locale + ": " + df.format(new Date()));      
    }
}

public static DateFormat getShortDateInstanceWithoutYears(Locale locale) {
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = (SimpleDateFormat) DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, locale);
    sdf.applyPattern(sdf.toPattern().replaceAll("[^\\p{Alpha}]*y+[^\\p{Alpha}]*", ""));
    return sdf;
}

You see that this snippet tests it for all locales as well. It looks to work fine for all locales here.