Question

I need today’s date – and zero anything else (” 05/06/08 00:00:00 “)

I’ve tried

Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance(); 
calendar.set(Calendar.HOUR, 0);        
Date date1 = calendar.getTime();                             
System.out.println(date1);

Run: (This is seriously messed up)

If the hour on the computer is < 12:00 at noon : Sun Mar 08 00:44:39 IST 2009

If the hour on the computer is > 12:00 at noon : Sun Mar 08 12:46:53 IST 2009

So I gave this up.

All the Date’s setters are deprecated (except the epoch time) – so I don’t want to use them either

The only thing I could think of is

Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();     
SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");
String sDate = dateFormat.format(calendar.getTime());
Date today = dateFormat.parse(sDate);

But this is such a lame code I can’t bring myself to write it.

Any other option?

Thanks!

Answer 1

My standard advice for Java date/time questions: don’t use java.util.{Calendar,Date}. Use Joda Time. That way you can represent a date as a date (with no associated time zone), instead of a date/time. Or you could use a DateMidnight if that’s what you want to represent. (Be careful of combinations of time zone and date where there is no midnight though…)

What do you need to use the Date with? If you can get away with changing to use Joda throughout, that’s great. Otherwise, you can use Joda to do what you want and then convert to milliseconds (and then to java.util.Date) when you really need to.

(Michael’s solution when using Date/Calendar is fine if you really want to stick within a broken API… but I can’t overstate how much better Joda is…)