Question

I am trying to set the year of a java.util.Date.

he time stamp I need to parse does not include the year so I did this:

private static final SimpleDateFormat logTimeStampFormat = 
    new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");

boolean isAfterRefDate (String line, Date refDate) {        
    try {
        Date logTimeStamp = logTimeStampFormat.parse(line);
        logTimeStamp.setYear(2012);      // But this is deprecated!
        return logTimeStamp.after(refDate);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        // Handle exception
    }        
}

To avoid using a deprecated method, I do like this:

private static final SimpleDateFormat logTimeStampFormat = 
    new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");

private static Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();

boolean isAfterRefDate (String line, Date refDate) {
    try {
        Date logTimeStamp = logTimeStampFormat.parse(line);
        cal.setTime(logTimeStamp);
        cal.set(Calendar.YEAR, 2012);
        logTimeStamp = cal.getTime();            
        return logTimeStamp.after(refDate);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        // Handle exception
    }        
}

I just don’t think that this is the best way to solve this problem. I have to first set the calendar object properly and then get the date object back from it while earlier I could just modify the date object directly.

Can someone suggest a better approach?

Answer 1

Can someone suggest a better approach.

Sure – try to avoid using Date and Calendar in the first place. Use Joda Time instead, which is much better.

Setting the year on a Date is an inherently ambiguous operation – what time zone is this year meant to be? What would you expect to happen if you’re setting a year of 2013 on a previous date of February 29th 2012?

Using Joda Time will make your code much clearer in terms of what kind of data you’re really expecting. You can always convert to/from Date and Calendar at API boundaries if you really need to.