Java SimpleDateFormat class to convert a Java Date to a formatted String.

The Java SimpleDateFormat class provides lets you easily convert (a) between a Java String to a Date or (b) perform the opposite conversion, from a Java Date to a String.

In following example, we first retrieve current date   and then we'll create a Java SimpleDateFormat object to define the custom format  Here's the source code for a complete Java SimpleDateFormat example class 

import java.util.Date;

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;

import java.util.Calendar;

/**

 * SimpleDateFormat example: Convert from a Date to a formatted String

*/

public class JavaSimpleDateFormatTest

{

  public static void main(String[] args)

  {

    // (1) get today's date

    Date today = Calendar.getInstance().getTime();

    // (2) create our date "formatter"

    SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd-hh.mm");

    // (3) create a new String using the date format we want

    String formatedDate = formatter.format(today);

   

    System.out.println("Folder Name = " + formatedDate );

  }

}

In this example, we specify custom date format looked like this:

yyyy-MM-dd-hh.mm

Formatted date output looks like this:

2012-01-06-08.23

Other custom date format

yyyy-MM-dd                 Output    2012-01-06    yyyyMMdd                   Output    20120106    EEE MMM dd hh:mm:ss yyyy   Output    Fri Jan 06 08:32:51 20   yyyy-MM-dd-hh.mm.ss                        output            2012-01-06-08.23.32