Joda Time toDate() wrong result

Question

I am using this code:

date - Date object from DatePicker, as string Thu Sep 10 00:00:00 GMT+03:00 2020

mDate = DateTime(date)
           .withHourOfDay(0)
           .withMinuteOfHour(0)
           .withSecondOfMinute(0)
           .withMillisOfSecond(0)
           .toDate()

The result mDate - Wed Sep 09 03:00:00 GMT+03:00 2020

What wrong with this?

Answer 1

You are not converting the DateTime object to java.util.Date correctly. A correct way is to get the milliseconds from DateTime object and initialize the java.util.Date with the milliseconds.

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.TimeZone;

import org.joda.time.DateTime;
import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormat;
import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Define formatter
        DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormat.forPattern("EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss zZ yyyy");

        // Date-time string from DatePicker
        String strDateTime = "Thu Sep 10 00:00:00 GMT+03:00 2020";

        DateTime dateTime = DateTime.parse(strDateTime, formatter);
        System.out.println(dateTime);

        // No. of milliseconds from the epoch of 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z 
        long millis = dateTime.getMillis();
        System.out.println(millis);

        Date mDate = new Date(millis);
        // Display java.util.Date object in my default time-zone (BST)
        System.out.println(mDate);

        //Display java.util.Date in a different time-zone and using custom format
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss z yyyy");
        sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT+3"));
        System.out.println(sdf.format(mDate));
    }
}

Output:

2020-09-09T21:00:00.000Z
1599685200000
Wed Sep 09 22:00:00 BST 2020
Thu Sep 10 00:00:00 GMT+03:00 2020

Note: java.util.Date does not represent a Date/Time object. It simply represents the no. of milliseconds from the epoch of 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z. It does not have any time-zone or zone-offset information. When you print it, Java prints the string obtained by applying the time-zone of your JVM. If you want to print it in some other timezone, you can do so using the SimpleDateFormat as shown above.

I recommend you switch from the outdated and error-prone java.util date-time API and SimpleDateFormat to the modern java.time date-time API and the corresponding formatting API (package, java.time.format). Learn more about the modern date-time API from Trail: Date Time. If your Android API level is still not compliant with Java8, check How to use ThreeTenABP in Android Project and Java 8+ APIs available through desugaring.

The following table shows an overview of modern date-time classes: