Question

I’m writing a small android app that lets the user pick a date and it shows him how many days are left to this date. Now I would like to store that date so that next time the app starts, it will keep the information. I was thinking it’s probably best to save the date in a file, and my question is – how is it best to do this so it’ll be easy to parse that date afterwards?

Answer 1

I speak from experience, The Best way to store a Date is to store it’s UNIX Epoch time,

SharedPreferences settings = getSharedPreferences("my_prefs", 0);
  SharedPreferences.Editor editor = settings.edit();
  editor.putString("date", myDate.getTime() ); //getTime is a long (So store it as a string/long, doesn't really matter)
  editor.commit();

It’ll save you the time/code from parsing it.

When retrieving the Date, just use the new Date(long date) Constructor or the Calendar class also has setTimeinMillis.

Good Luck.