Customizing Formats

The previous section, Using Predefined Formats, described the formatting styles provided by the DateFormat class. In most cases these predefined formats are adequate. However, if you want to create your own customized formats, you can use the SimpleDateFormat class.

The code examples that follow demonstrate the methods of the SimpleDateFormat class. You can find the full source code for the examples in the file named SimpleDateFormatDemo.

About Patterns

When you create a SimpleDateFormat object, you specify a pattern String. The contents of the pattern String determine the format of the date and time. For a full description of the pattern's syntax, see the tables in Date Format Pattern Syntax.

The following code formats a date and time according to the pattern String passed to the SimpleDateFormat constructor. The String returned by the format method contains the formatted date and time that are to be displayed.

Date today;
String output;
SimpleDateFormat formatter;

formatter = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern, currentLocale);
today = new Date();
output = formatter.format(today);
System.out.println(pattern + " " + output);

The following table shows the output generated by the previous code example when the U.S. Locale is specified:

Patterns and Locale

The SimpleDateFormat class is locale-sensitive. If you instantiate SimpleDateFormat without a Locale parameter, it will format the date and time according to the default Locale. Both the pattern and the Locale determine the format. For the same pattern, SimpleDateFormat may format a date and time differently if the Locale varies.

In the example code that follows, the pattern is hardcoded in the statement that creates the SimpleDateFormat object:

Date today;
String result;
SimpleDateFormat formatter;

formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE d MMM yy",
                                 currentLocale);
today = new Date();
result = formatter.format(today);
System.out.println("Locale: " + currentLocale.toString());
System.out.println("Result: " + result);

When the currentLocale is set to different values, the preceding code example generates this output:

Locale: fr_FR
Result: mar. 30 juin 09
Locale: de_DE
Result: Di 30 Jun 09
Locale: en_US
Result: Tue 30 Jun 09

Date Format Pattern Syntax

You can design your own format patterns for dates and times from the list of symbols in the following table:

Characters that are not letters are treated as quoted text. That is, they will appear in the formatted text even if they are not enclosed within single quotes.

The number of symbol letters you specify also determines the format. For example, if the "zz" pattern results in "PDT," then the "zzzz" pattern generates "Pacific Daylight Time." The following table summarizes these rules: