How to Get a Date Without Time in Java

How do I get a Date without time in Java?

Do you absolutely have to use java.util.Date? I would thoroughly recommend that you use Joda Time or the java.time package from Java 8 instead. In particular, while Date and Calendar always represent a particular instant in time, with no such concept as "just a date", Joda Time does have a type representing this (LocalDate). Your code will be much clearer if you're able to use types which represent what you're actually trying to do.

There are many, many other reasons to use Joda Time or java.time instead of the built-in java.util types - they're generally far better APIs. You can always convert to/from a java.util.Date at the boundaries of your own code if you need to, e.g. for database interaction.

How to get only date without time from calendar?

This might help

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
cal.add(Calendar.DATE, 1);
SimpleDateFormat format1 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");

String formatted = format1.format(cal.getTime());
System.out.println(formatted);
// Output "2020-10-19"

Removing time from a Date object?

The quick answer is :

No, you are not allowed to do that. Because that is what Date use for.

From javadoc of Date :

The class Date represents a specific instant in time, with millisecond precision.

However, since this class is simply a data object. It dose not care about how we describe it.
When we see a date 2012/01/01 12:05:10.321, we can say it is 2012/01/01, this is what you need.
There are many ways to do this.

Example 1 : by manipulating string

Input string : 2012/01/20 12:05:10.321

Desired output string : 2012/01/20

Since the yyyy/MM/dd are exactly what we need, we can simply manipulate the string to get the result.

String input = "2012/01/20 12:05:10.321";
String output = input.substring(0, 10);  // Output : 2012/01/20

Example 2 : by SimpleDateFormat

Input string : 2012/01/20 12:05:10.321

Desired output string : 01/20/2012

In this case we want a different format.

String input = "2012/01/20 12:05:10.321";
DateFormat inputFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
Date date = inputFormatter.parse(input);

DateFormat outputFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
String output = outputFormatter.format(date); // Output : 01/20/2012

For usage of SimpleDateFormat, check SimpleDateFormat JavaDoc.

Get current date without time

You could use a Calendar to solve this:

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
cal.setTime(yourDate);
cal.set(Calendar.HOUR, 0);
cal.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 0);
cal.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);
cal.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, 0);
Date desiredDate = cal.getTime();

Java program to get the current date without timestamp

A java.util.Date object is a kind of timestamp - it contains a number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC. So you can't use a standard Date object to contain just a day / month / year, without a time.

As far as I know, there's no really easy way to compare dates by only taking the date (and not the time) into account in the standard Java API. You can use class Calendar and clear the hour, minutes, seconds and milliseconds:

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
cal.clear(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY);
cal.clear(Calendar.AM_PM);
cal.clear(Calendar.MINUTE);
cal.clear(Calendar.SECOND);
cal.clear(Calendar.MILLISECOND);

Do the same with another Calendar object that contains the date that you want to compare it to, and use the after() or before() methods to do the comparison.

As explained into the Javadoc of java.util.Calendar.clear(int field):

The HOUR_OF_DAY, HOUR and AM_PM fields are handled independently and the the resolution rule for the time of day is applied. Clearing one of the fields doesn't reset the hour of day value of this Calendar. Use set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0) to reset the hour value.

edit - The answer above is from 2010; in Java 8, there is a new date and time API in the package java.time which is much more powerful and useful than the old java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar classes. Use the new date and time classes instead of the old ones.

Java Date cut off time information

The recommended way to do date/time manipulation is to use a Calendar object:

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(); // locale-specific
cal.setTime(dateObject);
cal.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0);
cal.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 0);
cal.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);
cal.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, 0);
long time = cal.getTimeInMillis();

Read date without timezone information

Assuming you are referring to the part of Florida following EST, you can set the timezone for SimpleDateFormat and set your TimeZone to EST.

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
format.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("America/New_York"));
Date date = format.parse("2014-01-30 07:48:25");

Your parsed date now can be utilized by your default TimeZone of the system (or set it to your liking as we did in the first place).

TimeZone.setDefault(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
System.out.println(date);

The output I get for your date offset to UTC:

Thu Jan 30 12:48:25 UTC 2014