how to calculate the elapsed time of a particular event in my application?

Question

I need to show in my software the amount of days, hours and minutes that a particular event occurred.

I get a string with the value of the last event and calculating the amount of time that the event occurred.

..

lastEvent: String = lastEventOcorr (); "16.07.2013 19:20:06"

..

example:

Last event occurred: 3 Days 6 Hours 45 Minutes and 42 Seconds

or

Last event occurred: 5 Minutes 30 Seconds

..

There is a practical way to do this calculation?

I really appreciate all the help.

Thank you very much

Answer 1

Here are several approaches on how to parse your String into a Date instance.

Afterwards you need to calculate the difference between the parsed Date and the current date ( new Date() ).

Finally you can format your resulting difference according to your preferences.

Answer 2

I would strongly suggest simply doing System.currentTimeMillis() at the start of the event and at the end of the event.

long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
//EVENT
long stop = System.currentTimeMillis();

long difference = stop - start;

Then with a little math you can get it in a nicer format.

int seconds=(difference/1000)%60;
int minutes=(difference/(1000*60))%60;
int hours=(difference/(1000*60*60))%24;

Answer 3

Here is an example on how to count days, you can add hours and mins to this.

            long MILLIS_IN_DAY = 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24;

        String lastEvent =  "13.07.2013 10:20:06";
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd.MM.yyyy hh:mm:ss");
        Date lastEventDate = sdf.parse(lastEvent);
        Date currentDate = new Date();

        long timeElapsed = currentDate.getTime() - lastEventDate.getTime();
        long diffInDays = timeElapsed / MILLIS_IN_DAY; 

        System.out.println(diffInDays);