Convert a Date String to a DateTime (from Joda Time) in Java

This post will discuss how to convert a date string to a Joda Time DateTime object in Java.

Before the introduction of to java.time package with Java 8, the standard date and time classes are very poor. The Joda-Time library provides a quality replacement for the date and time classes for Java.

To parse a date-time from the given text into a new DateTime object, you can simply use the DateTimeFormatter.parseDateTime() method. To create a formatter from a pattern string, you can call the static factory method DateTimeFormat.forPattern().

import org.joda.time.DateTime;

import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormat;

public class Main {

public static void main(String[] args) {

String s = "2017-12-24 14:17:21";

DateTime datetime = DateTimeFormat.forPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss")

.parseDateTime(s);

System.out.println(datetime);

}

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Output (will vary):

2017-12-24T14:17:21.000-10:30

To use a specified time zone for parsing, use the withZone(DateTimeZone) method.

import org.joda.time.DateTime;

import org.joda.time.DateTimeZone;

import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormat;

import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;

public class Main {

public static void main(String[] args) {

String date = "2017-12-22 14:17:21";

DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormat.forPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss")

.withZone(DateTimeZone.UTC);

DateTime datetime = formatter.parseDateTime(date);

System.out.println(datetime);

}

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Output (will vary):

2017-12-22T14:17:21.000Z

That’s all about converting a date string to a Joda Time DateTime object in Java.

Convert a Date String to a DateTime (from Joda Time) in Java

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