Java SimpleDateFormat Example

SimpleDateFormat example explains you formatting of date in the specified format.

Java SimpleDateFormat Example

In this section we will discuss about how to format a date into the specified format.

To format a date into the specified date format we may use the java.text.SimpleDateFormat class. SimpleDateFormat class is used to format and parse the date in the locale-sensitive mode. It formats the date to text and parses the text to date. SimpleDateFormate facilitate to format the user defined date-time formatting.

To format the date there are various date and time patterns. Formats of date and time is specified in a date and time pattern strings. In the pattern strings letters from 'A' to 'Z' and 'a' to 'z' are reserved. Following table explains the letter reserved for the specified pattern.

Example :

Here an example is being given which will demonstrate you about about how to format a date using SimpleDateFormat. In this example we will create a simple Java class where we will specified a date format as a String and then we will format that date using SimpleDateFormat. We will use the format() method to format the date into the specified format.

FormatDateExample.java

package dateformat;

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

public class FormatDateExample {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
        String stringDate = "2011-01-18 00:00:00.0";

        SimpleDateFormat dt = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss");
        Date date = dt.parse(stringDate);
        
        SimpleDateFormat dt1 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
        System.out.println("New Formatted Date : "+dt1.format(date));
    }
}

Output

When you will compile and execute the above example you will get the output as follows :

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