Question

Even if the date is equal or not equal CompareTo failes. It just print 1.

CompareTo doesn’t return 0 on comparison. !!

this silly code squeeze my head. Hey friends where i made foul?

import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Date;

public class date {

public static void main (String args[]) throws ParseException
{


    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
    Date expiry = sdf.parse("2012-11-09");


    System.out.println(sdf.format(expiry));


    Calendar cal1 = Calendar.getInstance();
    Calendar cal2 = Calendar.getInstance();
    cal1.setTime(expiry);
    cal1.add(Calendar.DATE, -2);
    System.out.println(sdf.format(cal1.getTime()));
    System.out.println(sdf.format(cal2.getTime()));
    int j = cal1.compareTo(cal2);

    System.out.println("The result is :" + j);
}

}

Answer 1

compareTo tells the truth. You’ve just hidden the hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds from the output.

The expiry date is set to a day at 00:00:00.0000 (the very first millisecond of that day) while cal2 still carries the actual time.