Getting the Time component of a Java Date or Calendar

Question

Is there a simple or elegant way to grab only the time of day (hours/minutes/seconds/milliseconds) part of a Java Date (or Calendar, it really doesn't matter to me)? I'm looking for a nice way to separately consider the date (year/month/day) and the time-of-day parts, but as far as I can tell, I'm stuck with accessing each field separately.

I know I could write my own method to individually grab the fields I'm interested, but I'd be doing it as a static utility method, which is ugly. Also, I know that Date and Calendar objects have millisecond precision, but I don't see a way to access the milliseconds component in either case.

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Edit: I wasn't clear about this: using one of the Date::getTime() or Calendar::getTimeInMillis is not terribly useful to me, since those return the number of milliseconds since the epoch (represented by that Date or Calendar), which does not actually separate the time of day from the rest of the information.

@Jherico's answer is the closest thing, I think, but definitely is something I'd still have to roll into a method I write myself. It's not exactly what I'm going for, since it still includes hours, minutes, and seconds in the returned millisecond value - though I could probably make it work for my purposes.

I still think of each component as separate, although of course, they're not. You can write a time as the number of milliseconds since an arbitrary reference date, or you could write the exact same time as year/month/day hours:minutes:seconds.milliseconds.

This is not for display purposes. I know how to use a DateFormat to make pretty date strings.

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Edit 2: My original question arose from a small set of utility functions I found myself writing - for instance:

• Checking whether two Dates represent a date-time on the same day;
• Checking whether a date is within a range specified by two other dates, but sometimes checking inclusively, and sometimes not, depending on the time component.

Does Joda Time have this type of functionality?

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Edit 3: @Jon's question regarding my second requirement, just to clarify: The second requirement is a result of using my Dates to sometimes represent entire days - where the time component doesn't matter at all - and sometimes represent a date-time (which is, IMO, the most accurate word for something that contains year/month/day and hours:minutes:seconds:...).

When a Date represents an entire day, its time parts are zero (e.g. the Date's "time component" is midnight) but the semantics dictate that the range check is done inclusively on the end date. Because I just leave this check up to Date::before and Date::after, I have to add 1 day to the end date - hence the special-casing for when the time-of-day component of a Date is zero.

Hope that didn't make things less clear.

Answer 1

To answer part of it, accessing the millisecond component is done like this:

long mill = Calendar.getInstance().getTime();

I don't know what you want to do with the specifics, but you could use the java.text.SimpleDateFormat class if it is for text output.

Answer 2

You can call the getTimeInMillis() function on a Calendar object to get the time in milliseconds. You can call get(Calendar.MILLISECOND) on a calendar object to get the milliseconds of the second. If you want to display the time from a Date or Calendar object, use the DateFormat class. Example: DateFormat.getTimeInstance().format(now). There is also a SimpleDateFormat class that you can use.

Answer 3

Extracting the time portion of the day should be a matter of getting the remainder number of milliseconds when you divide by the number of milliseconds per day.

long MILLIS_PER_DAY = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
Date now = Calendar.getInstance().getTime();
long timePortion = now.getTime() % MILLIS_PER_DAY;

Alternatively, consider using joda-time, a more fully featured time library.

Answer 4

Okay, I know this is a predictable answer, but... use Joda Time. That has separate representations for "a date", "an instant", "a time of day" etc. It's a richer API and a generally saner one than the built-in classes, IMO.

If this is the only bit of date/time manipulation you're interested in then it may be overkill... but if you're using the built-in date/time API for anything significant, I'd strongly recommend that you move away from it to Joda as soon as you possibly can.

As an aside, you should consider what time zone you're interested in. A Calendar has an associated time zone, but a Date doesn't (it just represents an instant in time, measured in milliseconds from the Unix epoch).

Answer 5

If all you're worried about is getting it into a String for display or saving, then just create a SimpleDateFormat that only displays the time portion, like new SimpleDateFormat("HH:mm:ss"). The date is still in the Date object, of course, but you don't care.

If you want to do arithmetic on it, like take two Date objects and find how many seconds apart they are while ignoring the date portion, so that "2009-09-01 11:00:00" minus "1941-12-07 09:00:00" equals 2 hours, then I think you need to use a solution like Jherico's: get the long time and take it module 1 day.

Answer 6

Why do you want to separate them? If you mean to do any arithmetic with the time portion, you will quickly get into trouble. If you pull out 11:59pm and add a minute, now that your time and day are separate, you've screwed yourself--you'll have an invalid time and an incorrect date.

If you just want to display them, then applying various simple date format's should get you exactly what you want.

If you want to manipulate the date, I suggest you get the long values and base everything off of that. At any point you can take that long and apply a format to get the minutes/hours/seconds to display pretty easily.

But I'm just a little concerned with the concept of manipulating day and time separately, seems like opening a can o' worms. (Not to even mention time zone problems!).

I'm fairly sure this is why Java doesn't have an easy way to do this.