Question

I’d like to know the simplest way, in Java, to get a list of dates in the future where daylight savings time will change.

One rather inellegant way to do this would be to simply iterate over a bunch of years’ worth of days, testing them against TimeZone.inDaylightTime(). This will work, and I’m not worried about efficiency since this will only need to run every time my app starts, but I wonder if there’s a simpler way.

If you’re wondering why I’m doing this, it’s because I have a javascript app which needs to handle third-party data containing UTC timestamps. I want a reliable way to translate from GMT to EST on the client side. See Javascript — Unix Time to Specific Time Zone I’ve written some javascript which will do it, but I want to get precise transition dates from the server.

Answer 1

Joda Time (as ever) makes this really easy due to the DateTimeZone.nextTransition method. For example:

import org.joda.time.*;
import org.joda.time.format.*;

public class Test
{    
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        DateTimeZone zone = DateTimeZone.forID("Europe/London");        
        DateTimeFormatter format = DateTimeFormat.mediumDateTime();

        long current = System.currentTimeMillis();
        for (int i=0; i < 100; i++)
        {
            long next = zone.nextTransition(current);
            if (current == next)
            {
                break;
            }
            System.out.println (format.print(next) + " Into DST? " 
                                + !zone.isStandardOffset(next));
            current = next;
        }
    }
}

Output:

25-Oct-2009 01:00:00 Into DST? false
28-Mar-2010 02:00:00 Into DST? true
31-Oct-2010 01:00:00 Into DST? false
27-Mar-2011 02:00:00 Into DST? true
30-Oct-2011 01:00:00 Into DST? false
25-Mar-2012 02:00:00 Into DST? true
28-Oct-2012 01:00:00 Into DST? false
31-Mar-2013 02:00:00 Into DST? true
27-Oct-2013 01:00:00 Into DST? false
30-Mar-2014 02:00:00 Into DST? true
26-Oct-2014 01:00:00 Into DST? false
29-Mar-2015 02:00:00 Into DST? true
25-Oct-2015 01:00:00 Into DST? false
...

With Java 8, you can get the same information using ZoneRules with its nextTransition and previousTransition methods.