Convert String to date and compare

Question

One of the fields which I extract from a database is a date in string format and I need to convert it into a date type to compare with another date.

How do I do this please? Everything I have tried so far gives me an error of java.util.Date cannot be cast to java.sql.Date and this is attempting the following example;

simpledateformat-gives-java-lang-classcastexception-java-util-date

An example of the date extracted in string format is "2012-10-15 09:00:29.157". I think the format to declare is yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS but not sure.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can create a java.util.Date from java.sql.Date as follows:

java.util.Date date = new java.util.Date(resultSet.getDate("Column").getTime());

Alternatively you can convert the java.sql.Date to either java.util.Calendar or Joda library's DateTime and perform comparisons.

If you are looking at parsing date, then java.text.SimpleDateFormat is your friend.

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
java.util.Date date = format.parse("2012-10-15 09:00:29.157");

Answer 2

It simply means you are assigning java.util.Date in java.sql.Date

From your example you have to do following :

SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
java.util.Date date = (java.util.Date)formatter.parse(""2012-10-15 09:00:29.157"");

Answer 3

Convert to Date as Vikdor showed. then get the long timestamp = date.getTimestamp();

Now this long value is millisecons since 1970 utc. just compare by this value.