comparison of SimpleDateFormat

Question

i have a date was hard coded as a string but now i'm to fetch the expired date from the database and compare with it the current time. Here is a sample of the hard coded date stored in the database:2015-02-24T13:00:00.000Z and now i have to compare this date to the current time and to check if it the date is expired. How can this be resolved by comparing the current date and time in exactly this format?

Answer 1

You can do it in following simple way

    SimpleDateFormat input = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:sss");
    SimpleDateFormat output = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
    Date d = input.parse("2015-02-24T13:00:00.000Z");
    System.out.println(d);
    String formattedTime = output.format(d);
    System.out.println(formattedTime);

The SysOut will be the like this

Tue Feb 24 13:00:00 IST 2015 2015-02-24 13:00:00

For Comparison with current date do it in following way

SimpleDateFormat input = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:sss");
Date dbDate = input.parse("2015-02-24T13:00:00.000Z");
System.out.println("dbDate"+dbDate);
System.out.println(dbDate.compareTo(new Date()));

sysout will be like this

dbDateTue Feb 24 13:00:00 IST 2015 -1

here output will be -1 means dbDate is older than current date if output is 1 than dbDate is newer than current date.