How can I get the current date and time in UTC or GMT in Java

Question

When I create a new Date object, it is initialized to the current time but in the local timezone. How can I get the current date and time in GMT?

Answer 1

This definitely returns UTC time: as String and Date objects !

static final String DATEFORMAT = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss"

public static Date GetUTCdatetimeAsDate()
{
    //note: doesn't check for null
    return StringDateToDate(GetUTCdatetimeAsString());
}

public static String GetUTCdatetimeAsString()
{
    final SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(DATEFORMAT);
    sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
    final String utcTime = sdf.format(new Date());

    return utcTime;
}

public static Date StringDateToDate(String StrDate)
{
    Date dateToReturn = null;
    SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(DATEFORMAT);

    try
    {
        dateToReturn = (Date)dateFormat.parse(StrDate);
    }
    catch (ParseException e)
    {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    return dateToReturn;
}

Hope this helps!!

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