Question

I have a date format as “Nov 10,1980″ in a string format(String str=”Nov 10, 1980”), and i want to convert it to 1980-11-10. can any one tell me how to do that using java.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You should first parse it from the original text format, then format the result using the format you want it to end up as. You can use SimpleDateFormat for this, or Joda Time (which is generally a much better date/time API).

Sample code using SimpleDateFormat:

import java.text.*;
import java.util.*;

public class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {        
        String inputText = "Nov 10,1980";

        TimeZone utc = TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC");

        // Or dd instead of d - it depends whether you'd use "Nov 08,1980"
        // or "Nov 8,1980" etc.
        SimpleDateFormat inputFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM d,yyyy",
                                                            Locale.US);
        inputFormat.setTimeZone(utc);

        SimpleDateFormat outputFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd",
                                                             Locale.US);
        outputFormat.setTimeZone(utc);

        Date parsed = inputFormat.parse(inputText);
        String outputText = outputFormat.format(parsed);

        System.out.println(outputText); // 1980-11-10
    }
}

Note that:

• I’ve explicitly specified the locale to use; otherwise if you try to parse the text on a system with (say) a French default locale, it will try to parse it using French month names.
• I’ve explicitly set the time zone as UTC to avoid any daylight saving time issues (where a particular value could be ambiguous or even non-existent in the default time zone)