Java Examples – Date Parsing & Formatting

There’s many different ways to parse and format dates in Java. Here’s a simple example of just one way:

package pkgDateFormatter;

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

public class DateFormatter {

public static void main(String[] args) {

    String string = "06/01/2024";
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy", Locale.ENGLISH);
    Date date = null;
    try {
        date = sdf.parse(string);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    System.out.println(date); // output: Sat Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2024

    sdf.applyPattern("yyyy-MM-dd");
    System.out.println(sdf.format(date)); // Sat Jan 02 00:00:00 GMT 2010

}

}

All available date formats from the javadoc:

Note that the patterns are case sensitive.