Calculating days between two dates

Question

I have a requirement like calculating remaining days between two-dates. It is working fine for me. but the problem is when i sent the build to UK, there it is displaying one day less compare to India(ex: India :215 days but in UK:214 days). I am using the below code:

public static int noOfDays(String currDate, String tarDate){
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");
    Date date1 = null;
    Date date2 = null;

    try {
        date1 = sdf.parse(currDate);
        date2 = sdf.parse(tarDate);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    return (int)( (date2.getTime() - date1.getTime()) / (1000 * 60 * 60 * 24));
}

For getting current date:

public static String getcurrentdate()
{
    Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance();

    int month = now.get(Calendar.MONTH) + 1;
    int year = now.get(Calendar.YEAR);
    int day = now.get(Calendar.DATE);
    return day+"/"+month+"/"+year;
}

And i believe that Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance(); will gives the Local time Zone instance only.if it is right then it should give same result in any location.but the result seems different. Please help me to resolve this issue.

Thanks, Ganesh

you can use Calendar.setTimeZone() method to set the UK time zone — Debobroto Das, Nov 27 '12 at 09:45
Take a look at this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/230126/how-to-handle-calendar-timezones-using-java — RNJ, Nov 27 '12 at 09:45
current date take from machine's current time where it's deploy,set time zone — Jubin Patel, Nov 27 '12 at 09:46

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 27 '12 at 10:01

When store and do time calculations, you should store all timestamps in UTC. Then explicitly set Timezone to UTC.
If you have to display local time on a display, you have to transform the Utc timestamps immedeatly before displaying, do not store localtime in the Database.
If you need localtime, you need to store an additional timezone info together with your utc time.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 27 '12 at 10:08

1

you need to set the TimeZone of Calender class. You can do so by writing :

Calender.setTimeZone(timeZone);

you can get the TimeZone of the location where the app is running by using this:

TimeZone.getDefault();

answered Nov 27 '12 at 10:08

Misha Bhardwaj

1,377
10
14

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 27 '12 at 10:04

0

Use JodaTime library for date calculations and always store date s in UTC.

answered Nov 27 '12 at 10:04

Subin Sebastian

10,870
3
37
42

It is not recommended to use Joda Time library. – Ganesh Nov 27 '12 at 11:14

Calculating days between two dates

3 Answers3