How to convert String to Date with a specific format in java

Question

I have a requirement to convert String to Date (in dd-MM-yyyy format). But dateformat.parse gives the format with seconds. I need to convert the String date to Date in the same format as mentioned above.

Answer 1

If you do not need to use time of day or time zone, you can parse it by LocalDate.

String str = "01-01-2000";
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd-MM-yyyy");
LocalDate date = LocalDate.parse(str, formatter);

Note that for day and time people most of the time would want a ZonedDateTime rather than a LocalDateTime. The name is counter-intuitive; the Local in both LocalDate and LocalDateTime means any locality in general rather than a specific time zone.

Answer 2

The class Date will always contain both date a nd time information, since it represents an instant in time.

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

public class ParsingDate {

    public static void main(String[] args) {  
            DateFormat fmt = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy");
            Date d;
            try {
                d = fmt.parse("04-12-2019");
                System.out.println(d);  // Wed Dec 04 00:00:00 CET 2019
            } catch (ParseException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }  
        }
}

As you can see, hours, minutes, seconds and millis get all set to 0.

If you later want to output the date in string format, you need to use the DateFormat#format(Date) method:

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

public class ParsingDate {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        DateFormat fmt = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy");
        Date d = new Date();
        System.out.println(d);  // Wed Dec 04 11:24:35 CET 2019
        System.out.println(fmt.format(d)); // 04-12-2019
    }
}

If you'd rather store only date information, you could use the java.time package and make use of LocalDate.
LocalDate stores only date information, since it does not represent an instant, rather a triple of year, month and date.

import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;

public class ParsingLocalDate {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        DateTimeFormatter fmt = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd-MM-yyyy");
        LocalDate d = LocalDate.parse("04-12-2019", fmt);
        System.out.println(d);  // 2019-12-04
    }
}

Answer 3

In most programming languages, date/time types are simply containers for the amount of time which has passed from a given point in time. They don’t have a format.

In the case of Java (AFAIR), time is measured in milliseconds since the Unix Epoch.

Since it's 2019, there is no excuse not to making use of the java.time APIs (or the ThreeTen backport) and you should avoid using the, now effectively deprecated, older APIs

Parse String to LocalDate

DateTimeFormatter inputFormatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd-MM-yyyy");
LocalDate localDate = LocalDate.parse("08-03-1972", inputFormatter);

Format LocalDate to desired format

DateTimeFormatter outputFormatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd EEE MMM yyyy");
String value = localDate.format(outputFormatter);
System.out.println(value);

which outputs

08 Wed. Mar. 1972