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Suppose there are two dates A(start time) & B(end time). A & B could be the time on the same day or even different day. My task is to show difference in seconds. Date format which i am using is

Date Format :: "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ"

For e.g. 

start date ::   "2011-11-16T14:09:23.000+00:00"
end date ::     "2011-11-17T05:09:23.000+00:00"

Help is appreciated.

JodaStephen
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Ankit Ostwal
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2 Answers2

113

Use the Seconds class:

DateTime now = DateTime.now();
DateTime dateTime = now.plusMinutes(10);
Seconds seconds = Seconds.secondsBetween(now, dateTime);
System.out.println(seconds.getSeconds());

This piece of code prints out 600. I think this is what you need.

As further advice, explore the documentation of joda-time. It's pretty good, and most things are very easy to discover.

In case you need some help with the parsing of dates (It's in the docs, really), check out the related questions, like this:

Parsing date with Joda with time zone

Community
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pcalcao
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    If you are looking for the difference (as a positive number) be sure to take the absolute value of `secondsBetween`, otherwise, you could possibly get a negative number if the arguments are reversed (e.g. if you call `Seconds.secondsBetween(dateTime, now)`. – user1366367 Aug 24 '13 at 22:30
7

The answer of @pcalcao will be best in most cases. Be aware that seconds will be rounded to an integer.

If you are interested in sub-seconds accuracy just substract the milliseconds:

double seconds = (now.getMillis() - dateTime.getMillis()) / 1000d;
linqu
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