How Convert Android Date to Linux TimeStamp?

Question

i have a date string in

DD-MM-YYYY (28-11-2011)

I want to convert it into linux time stamp without time or time is zero.

I am doing it by

String dateString="13-09-2011";
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy");
              Date date = null;
              try {
                    date = (Date)formatter.parse(dateString);
                    Log.v(Constants.LOGGING_TAG, "Date is " + dateString);
                } catch (ParseException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
                Log.v(Constants.LOGGING_TAG, "Today is " + date.getTime());

but this is not giving the desired result. Any body have any idea to solve this issue.

"not giving the desired result" isn't very precise. Please tell us what you're getting and what you expected. — Jon Skeet, Nov 28 '11 at 06:01
i provide the dateString = 28-11-2011 and it gives me 1322420400000. When i reconvert 1322420400000 to date, i got Sun, 27 Nov 2011 19:00:00 GMT. — Shahrukh A., Nov 28 '11 at 06:06

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 28 '11 at 06:03

It's not clear what the problem is as you haven't told us what you expected and what you're getting, but I suspect there are two potential problems:

You haven't specified a time zone, so the formatter will parse the value in the system local time zone. If you want a date only, you should probably set the formatter to UTC first:
```
formatter.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
```
If you want a Unix time value (in seconds), you'll need to divide the value in Date by 1000, as java.util.Date is represented in milliseconds:
```
long seconds = date.getTime() / 1000;
```

I'd also thoroughly recommend using Joda Time instead of the built-in classes for date/time manipulation.

+1 for the Joda-Time link, thanks Jon - why the heck haven't I found that before?!? Coming from Smalltalk to Java (long, long ago), I've always complained about how silly and unintuitive the Java Date implementation is. — Amos M. Carpenter, Nov 28 '11 at 06:45

How Convert Android Date to Linux TimeStamp?

1 Answers1