Ignore DST (Dayligt Saving Time) while formating date

Question

I have this application which compares current date to a parsed date from an xml file:

Date timeDiff = new Date(date.getTime() - new Date().getTime());

The problem is when i output the variable timeDiff as a string via simpleDateFormat, daylight saving time is taken to account which adds an extra hour. This messes up my output.

Is there anyway to make SimpleDateFormat ignore DST?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You're subtracting one time from another, to get a duration in milliseconds. You shouldn't be trying to format that as a date at all. It's a number of milliseconds, not a date.

It's not clear what you expect the result to be, but at the moment you're basically going about it the wrong way.

Answer 2

Why don't you just use Time . It has the normalize() method that takes a boolean to indicate if you want to ignore DST.

Answer 3

Ok guys! Maybe better with this solution:

public static String millisToString(long l){
        long h, m;
        h = l / 3600000;
        m = (l % 3600000) / 60000;
        if(h == 0){
            return m + "m";
        }else{
            return h + "h " + m + "m";
        }
    }