Question

I have date objects formatted like

2011/06/13 17:52:20

and being returned as strings. How would I compare this against another date formatted the same way. I want to determine which one is greater than, less than or equal to, for a conditional statement I am forming.

Without reinventing the wheel (or making several cases) when there might already be a framework for doing this

Thanks!

Answer 1

• use SimpleDateFormat to parse
• use compareTo(..) of the Date objects that are obtained

For example:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss");
Date date1 = sdf.parse(string1);
Date date2 = sdf.parse(string2);

int result = date1.compareTo(date2);

The result is (from the java.util.Date documentation):

the value 0 if the argument Date is equal to this Date; a value less than 0 if this Date is before the Date argument; and a value greater than 0 if this Date is after the Date argument.