Java Formatter Formatting Time and Date suffixes

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One of the more powerful conversion specifiers is %t.

It lets you format time and date information.

The %t specifier requires the use of a suffix to describe the portion and precise format of the time or date desired.

Suffixes

The suffixes are shown in the following table.

Suffix Replaced By
a Abbreviated weekday name
A Full weekday name
b Abbreviated month name
B Full month name
c Standard date and time string formatted as day month date hh::mm:ss tzone year
C First two digits of year
d Day of month as a decimal (01-31)
D month/day/year
e Day of month as a decimal (1-31)
F year-month-day
h Abbreviated month name
H Hour (00 to 23)
I Hour (01 to 12)
jDay of year as a decimal (001 to 366)
k Hour (0 to 23)
l Hour (1 to 12)
L Millisecond (000 to 999)
m Month as decimal (01 to 13)
M Minute as decimal (00 to 59)
N Nanosecond (000000000 to 999999999)
p Locale's equivalent of AM or PM in lowercase
Q Milliseconds from 1/1/1970
r hh:mm:ss (12-hour format)
R hh:mm (24-hour format)
S Seconds (00 to 60)
s Seconds from 1/1/1970 UTC
T hh:mm:ss (24-hour format)
y Year in decimal without century (00 to 99)
Y Year in decimal including century (0001 to 9999)
z Offset from UTC
Z Time zone name

For example, to display minutes, you would use %tM, where M indicates minutes in a two-character field.

The argument corresponding to the %t specifier must be of type Calendar, Date, Long, or long.

Here is a program that demonstrates several of the formats: 

// Formatting time and date.
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Formatter;

public class Main {
   public static void main(String args[]) {
      Formatter fmt = new Formatter();
      Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();

      // Display standard 12-hour time format.
      fmt.format("%tr", cal);
      System.out.println(fmt);/*w    ww  .   d e    m o 2   s   .  c  o  m*/
      fmt.close();

      // Display complete time and date information.
      fmt = new Formatter();
      fmt.format("%tc", cal);
      System.out.println(fmt);
      fmt.close();

      // Display just hour and minute.
      fmt = new Formatter();
      fmt.format("%tl:%tM", cal, cal);
      System.out.println(fmt);
      fmt.close();

      // Display month by name and number.
      fmt = new Formatter();
      fmt.format("%tB %tb %tm", cal, cal, cal);
      System.out.println(fmt);
      fmt.close();
   }
}

Sample output is shown here:

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