How to Convert Current Date into String in Java

Convert java.util.Date to String

Convert a Date to a String using DateFormat#format method:

String pattern = "MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss";

// Create an instance of SimpleDateFormat used for formatting 
// the string representation of date according to the chosen pattern
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern);

// Get the today date using Calendar object.
Date today = Calendar.getInstance().getTime();        
// Using DateFormat format method we can create a string 
// representation of a date with the defined format.
String todayAsString = df.format(today);

// Print the result!
System.out.println("Today is: " + todayAsString);

From http://www.kodejava.org/examples/86.html

Converting Date to String in SimpleDateFormat

To format current date you need to create a instance of Date which represents current date and then format it using SimpleDateFormat to string.

DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd MM yyyy");
String currDateString = dateFormat.format(new Date());
System.out.println(currDateString);

How to get current timestamp in string format in Java? yyyy.MM.dd.HH.mm.ss

Replace

new Timestamp();

with

new java.util.Date()

because there is no default constructor for Timestamp, or you can do it with the method:

new Timestamp(System.currentTimeMillis());

Convert Java Date from one format to another without converting it into string

Date represents a single point in time. That's it, nothing more, nothing less. It does not contain any information about time zones.

Wed Jun 06 12:38:15 BST 2018 is the same Date (instant) as Wed Jun 06 11:38:15 GMT 2018, just in a different time zone. It's like the words "humans" and "homo sapians". They refer to the same species, they are just kind of in a different "format".

So you don't need to change the date in any way. You just need to format it differently. This is why formatters return Strings. Only Strings can represent one particular format of a date.

Java string to date conversion

That's the hard way, and those java.util.Date setter methods have been deprecated since Java 1.1 (1997). Moreover, the whole java.util.Date class was de-facto deprecated (discommended) since introduction of java.time API in Java 8 (2014).

Simply format the date using DateTimeFormatter with a pattern matching the input string (the tutorial is available here).

In your specific case of "January 2, 2010" as the input string:

1. "January" is the full text month, so use the MMMM pattern for it
2. "2" is the short day-of-month, so use the d pattern for it.
3. "2010" is the 4-digit year, so use the yyyy pattern for it.

String string = "January 2, 2010";
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("MMMM d, yyyy", Locale.ENGLISH);
LocalDate date = LocalDate.parse(string, formatter);
System.out.println(date); // 2010-01-02

Note: if your format pattern happens to contain the time part as well, then use LocalDateTime#parse(text, formatter) instead of LocalDate#parse(text, formatter). And, if your format pattern happens to contain the time zone as well, then use ZonedDateTime#parse(text, formatter) instead.

Here's an extract of relevance from the javadoc, listing all available format patterns:

 String DATE_FORMAT_NOW = "yyyy-MM-dd";
 Date date = new Date();
 SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT_NOW);
 String stringDate = sdf.format(date );
    try {
        Date date2 = sdf.parse(stringDate);
    } catch(ParseException e){
     //Exception handling
    } catch(Exception e){
     //handle exception
    }