How to get the current date and time of your timezone in Java?

Question

I have my app hosted in a London Server. I am in Madrid, Spain. So the timezone is -2 hours.

How can I obtain the current date / time with my time zone.

Date curr_date = new Date(System.currentTimeMillis());

e.g.

Date curr_date = new Date(System.currentTimeMillis("MAD_TIMEZONE"));

With Joda-Time

DateTimeZone zone = DateTimeZone.forID("Europe/Madrid");
DateTime dt = new DateTime(zone);
int day = dt.getDayOfMonth();
int year = dt.getYear();
int month = dt.getMonthOfYear();
int hours = dt.getHourOfDay();
int minutes = dt.getMinuteOfHour();

Answer 1

Date is always UTC-based... or time-zone neutral, depending on how you want to view it. A Date only represents a point in time; it is independent of time zone, just a number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch. There's no notion of a "local instance of Date." Use Date in conjunction with Calendar and/or TimeZone.getDefault() to use a "local" time zone. Use TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Madrid") to get the Madrid time zone.

... or use Joda Time, which tends to make the whole thing clearer, IMO. In Joda Time you'd use a DateTime value, which is an instant in time in a particular calendar system and time zone.

In Java 8 you'd use java.time.ZonedDateTime, which is the Java 8 equivalent of Joda Time's DateTime.