Question

Possible Duplicates:
Calculating difference in dates in Java
How can I calculate a time span in Java and format the output?

Say you were given two dates as strings and they are in this format 8/11/11 9:16:36 PM how would I go about converting them to java Date objects so that I can then calculate the difference between two dates?

Answer 1

As long as both times are in GMT/UTC, you can do date1.getTime() - date2.getTime() and then divide the result by 86400000 to get number of days. The rest is probably pretty intuitive.

EDIT — based on edited question

To convert Strings into dates, use the SimpleDateFormat class.

String yourDateString = "8/11/11 9:16:36 PM";
SimpleDateFormat format =
            new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yy HH:mm:ss a");
Date yourDate = format.parse(yourDateString);