Question

I would like to take a date object like “Sat Feb 17 20:49:54 +0000 2007” and change the year variable to the current year dynamically to something like this “Sat Feb 17 20:49:54 +0000 2012” what would be the best way to do this in java?

Answer 1

If that’s already a date object, you can do this:

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
int currentYear = cal.get(Calendar.YEAR);
cal.setTime(dateObj);
//set the year to current year
cal.set(Calendar.YEAR, currentYear);
//new date object with current year
dateObj = cal.getTime();

If that’s a string, you can parse the string to a Java Date object first using SimpleDateFormat:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html
And the use the above calendar object.