Java format date string to date and vice versa

This is a quick tutorial on formatting date in the string to java Date and Date to a date in string.

Let's create a sample Java class called DateTimeUtils.java.

Parse Date String to Date:

Let's look into the example that we want to parse the date string 2022-08-22 or 2022-08-22 04:22:100 to Date.

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

public class DateTimeUtils {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
        String format = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss";
        String dateToFormat = "2022-08-22 04:22:100";
        Date formattedDate = parseDate(dateToFormat, format);
        System.out.println(formattedDate);
    }

    static Date parseDate(String date, String format) throws ParseException {
        if (date.isEmpty()) return null;
        return new SimpleDateFormat(format).parse(date);
    }
}

Here, we are using the SimpleDateFormat java class for parsing the date string to Date. We can provide any valid format as needed instead of yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss For e.g if we want to format "2022-08-22" to Date then we need to use the format "yyyy-MM-dd"

Parse Date to Date in String:

Now let's look into another example where we want to parse the date into the date string. Here we are trying to parse the current date to the desired format like "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"

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

public class DateTimeUtils {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
        String format = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss";
        Date dateToFormat = new Date();
        String formattedDate = formatDate(dateToFormat, format);
        System.out.println(formattedDate);
    }

    static String formatDate(Date date, String format) {
        return new SimpleDateFormat(format).format(date);
    }
}

We are using SimpleDateFormat class to format the desired Date to date in string

The format will be the desired valid format that might be "yyyy-MM-dd" as well.

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