Question

I want to implement a thread-safe function to remove the time part from java.util.Date.

I tried this way

private static final DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
public static Date removeTimeFromDate(Date date) {
        Date returnDate = date;

        if (date == null) {
            return returnDate;
        }

        //just have the date remove the time
        String targetDateStr = df.format(date);
        try {
            returnDate = df.parse(targetDateStr);
        } catch (ParseException e) {
        }

        return returnDate;
}

and use synchronized or threadLocal to make it thread-safe.
But it there any better way to implement it in Java. It seems this way is a bit verbose.
I am not satisfied with it.

Answer 1

A Date object holds a variable wich represents the time as the number of milliseconds since epoch. So, you can’t “remove” the time part. What you can do is set the time of that day to zero, which means it will be 00:00:00 000 of that day. This is done by using a GregorianCalendar:

GregorianCalendar gc = new GregorianCalendar();
gc.setTime(date);
gc.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0);
gc.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 0);
gc.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);
gc.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, 0);
Date returnDate = gc.getTime();