根据区域设置日期格式，然后获取日期部分

Question

What I want to achieve is to convert a date in format yyyyMMdd to locale format ie yyyy/MM/dd or dd/MM/yyyy etc. I am not interested in the time part, I just require date.

The function would take string date and return a string date in locale format.

What I currently have is:

dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd", Locale.getDefault());
convertedDate = dateFormat.parse("20120521");

Everything that I have tried after that either return me a long string with time and GMT etc, or the same string that I passed to the function.

Answer 1

It sounds like you've already got the parsing part sorted - that's entirely separate from the formatting part.

For formatting, I suspect you want:

DateFormat localeFormat = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.MEDIUM, locale);
String text = localeFormat.format(convertedDate);

... experiment with SHORT , MEDIUM , LONG and FULL to see which one meets your needs best, but I suspect it'll be SHORT or MEDIUM .

(You can omit the second argument to getDateInstance and it will use the default locale, but personally I'd advise including it explicitly for clarity.)

Answer 2

You want to use the DateFormat built in types

DateFormat df = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.Short, Locale.getDefault()));

As per the Javadocs

Use getDateInstance to get the normal date format for that country. There are other static factory methods available. Use getTimeInstance to get the time format for that country. Use getDateTimeInstance to get a date and time format. You can pass in different options to these factory methods to control the length of the result; from SHORT to MEDIUM to LONG to FULL. The exact result depends on the locale, but generally:

SHORT is completely numeric, such as 12.13.52 or 3:30pm MEDIUM is longer, such as Jan 12, 1952 LONG is longer, such as January 12, 1952 or 3:30:32pm FULL is pretty completely specified, such as Tuesday, April 12, 1952 AD or 3:30:42pm PST.

Answer 3

Here is an answer to your question: How can I format date by locale in Java?

an example:

DateFormat df = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT, yourLocale);
String formattedDate = df.format(yourDate);

Also if you have to do a lot with Dates, consider using Joda: Java, getting Date without time