How to get current moment in ISO 8601 format with date, hour, and minute?

Question

What is the most elegant way to get ISO 8601 formatted presentation of the current moment, UTC? It should look like: 2010-10-12T08:50Z.

Example:

String iso8601 = DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance(DateFormat.ISO_8601).format(date);

Answer 1

Try SimpleDateFormat to format any Date object you require:

TimeZone tz = TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC");

DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm'Z'"); // Quoted "Z" to indicate UTC, no timezone offset

df.setTimeZone(tz);

String nowAsISO = df.format(new Date());

Applying a new Date() as revealed above will format the current time.