Question

How do I get the current date and time in Java?

I am looking for something that is equivalent to DateTime.Now from C#.

Answer 1

Just construct a new Date object without any arguments; this will assign the current date and time to the new object.

import java.util.Date;

Date d = new Date();

In the words of the Javadocs for the zero-argument constructor:

Allocates a Date object and initializes it so that it represents the time at which it was allocated, measured to the nearest millisecond.

Make sure you’re using java.util.Date and not java.sql.Date — the latter doesn’t have a zero-arg constructor, and has somewhat different semantics that are the topic of an entirely different conversation. 🙂