Java Program to Get Current Date/TIme

In this program, you’ll learn to get the current date and time in different formats in Java.

 

Example 1: Get Current date and time in default format

  1. import java.time.LocalDateTime;
  2. public class CurrentDateTime {
  3. public static void main(String[] args) {
  4. LocalDateTime current = LocalDateTime.now();
  5. System.out.println("Current Date and Time is: " + current);
  6. }
  7. }

When you run the program, the output will be:

Current Date and Time is: 2017-08-02T11:25:44.973

In the above program, the current date and time is stored in variable current using LocalDateTime.now() method.

For default format, it is simply converted from a LocalDateTime object to a string internally using a toString() method.


Example 2: Get Current date and time with pattern

  1. import java.time.LocalDateTime;
  2. import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
  3. public class CurrentDateTime {
  4. public static void main(String[] args) {
  5. LocalDateTime current = LocalDateTime.now();
  6. DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
  7. String formatted = current.format(formatter);
  8. System.out.println("Current Date and Time is: " + formatted);
  9. }
  10. }

When you run the program, the output will be:

Current Date and Time is: 2017-08-02 11:29:57.401

In the above program, we’ve defined a pattern of format Year-Month-Day Hours:Minutes:Seconds.Milliseconds using a DateTimeFormatter object.

Then, we’ve used LocalDateTime‘s format() method to use the given formatter. This gets us the formatted string output.


Example 3: Get Current Date time using predefined constants

  1. import java.time.LocalDateTime;
  2. import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
  3. public class CurrentDateTime {
  4. public static void main(String[] args) {
  5. LocalDateTime current = LocalDateTime.now();
  6. DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.BASIC_ISO_DATE;
  7. String formatted = current.format(formatter);
  8. System.out.println("Current Date is: " + formatted);
  9. }
  10. }

When you run the program, the output will be:

Current Date is: 20170802

In the above program, we’ve used a predefined format constant BASIC_ISO_DATE to get the current ISO date as the output.


Example 4: Get Current Date time in localized style

  1. import java.time.LocalDateTime;
  2. import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
  3. import java.time.format.FormatStyle;
  4. public class CurrentDateTime {
  5. public static void main(String[] args) {
  6. LocalDateTime current = LocalDateTime.now();
  7. DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofLocalizedDateTime(FormatStyle.MEDIUM);
  8. String formatted = current.format(formatter);
  9. System.out.println("Current Date is: " + formatted);
  10. }
  11. }

When you run the program, the output will be:

Current Date is: Aug 2, 2017 11:44:19 AM

In the above program, we’ve used a Localized style Medium to get the current date time in the given format. There are other styles as well: Full, Long and Short.