I want to get Year, Month, Day, etc from Java Date to compare with Gregorian Calendar date in Java. Is this possible?

Question

I have a Date object in Java stored as Java's Date type.

I also have a Gregorian Calendar created date. The gregorian calendar date has no parameters and therefore is an instance of today's date (and time?).

With the java date, I want to be able to get the year, month, day, hour, minute, and seconds from the java date type and compare the the gregoriancalendar date.

I saw that at the moment the Java date is stored as a long and the only methods available seem to just write the long as a formatted date string. Is there a way to access Year, month, day, etc?

I saw that the getYear(), getMonth(), etc. methods for Date class have been deprecated. I was wondering what's the best practice to use the Java Date instance I have with the GregorianCalendar date.

My end goal is to do a date calculation so that I can check that the Java date is within so many hours, minutes etc of today's date and time.

I'm still a newbie to Java and am getting a bit puzzled by this.

Answer 1

Try something like:

Date date; // your date

// Choose time zone in which you want to interpret your Date

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Paris"));

cal.setTime(date);

int year = cal.get(Calendar.YEAR);

int month = cal.get(Calendar.MONTH);

int day = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);

// etc.

Beware, months start at 0, not 1.

Since Java 8 it's enough to use java.time.LocalDate preferably than java.util.Calendar. See this answer for how to do it.