Question

I’m trying to convert a long timestamp that is UTC to Eastern Standard Time and am totally lost. Any hints would be great!

Time format should be : 11/4/03 8:14 PM
Thanks in advance!

TimeZone utcTZ= TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC");
Calendar utcCal= Calendar.getInstance(utcTZ);
utcCal.setTimeInMillis(utcAsLongValue);



import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

SimpleDateFormat sdf= new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss zzz");
sdf.setTimeZone(utcTZ);
Date utcDate= utcCal.getTime();
sdf.formatDate(utcDate);

Answer 1

Yesterday occasionally I wrote the following method that can help you:

private Date shiftTimeZone(Date date, TimeZone sourceTimeZone, TimeZone targetTimeZone) {
    Calendar sourceCalendar = Calendar.getInstance();
    sourceCalendar.setTime(date);
    sourceCalendar.setTimeZone(sourceTimeZone);

    Calendar targetCalendar = Calendar.getInstance();
    for (int field : new int[] {Calendar.YEAR, Calendar.MONTH, Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, Calendar.HOUR, Calendar.MINUTE, Calendar.SECOND, Calendar.MILLISECOND}) {
        targetCalendar.set(field, sourceCalendar.get(field));
    }
    targetCalendar.setTimeZone(targetTimeZone);

    return targetCalendar.getTime();
}

Now you just have to format the date. Use SimpleDateFormat for this. Here is the example:

DateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yy hh:mm a");
format.format(date);