How do I get date, month, year values from the current date?

What date, month, year, day-of-week, day-of-month, day-of-year is it today? If we want to answer these question we can use java.util.Calendar and java.util.GregorianCalendar which is the implementation of Calendar abstract class.

These classes can help us to get integer value such as date, month, year from a Date object. Let’s see the example code.

package org.kodejava.util;

import java.util.Calendar;

public class CalendarExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Get various information from the Date object.
        Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
        int day = cal.get(Calendar.DATE);
        int month = cal.get(Calendar.MONTH) + 1;
        int year = cal.get(Calendar.YEAR);
        int dow = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);
        int dom = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);
        int doy = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR);

        System.out.println("Current Date: " + cal.getTime());
        System.out.println("Day         : " + day);
        System.out.println("Month       : " + month);
        System.out.println("Year        : " + year);
        System.out.println("Day of Week : " + dow);
        System.out.println("Day of Month: " + dom);
        System.out.println("Day of Year : " + doy);
    }
}

Here is the result of this example:

Current Date: Wed Sep 15 17:34:44 CST 2021
Day         : 15
Month       : 9
Year        : 2021
Day of Week : 4
Day of Month: 15
Day of Year : 258

You might also want to try to use the Joda Time library for this. Here another example for getting information about date and time using Joda: How do I get date / time fields of date in Joda?.

How do I get the minimum and maximum value of a primitive data types?

To get the minimum or maximum value of a primitive data types such as byte, short, int, long, float and double we can use the wrapper class provided for each of them, the wrapper classes are Byte, Short, Integer, Long, Float and Double which is located in java.lang package.

package org.kodejava.lang;

public class MinMaxExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Byte.MIN    = " + Byte.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Byte.MAX    = " + Byte.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Short.MIN   = " + Short.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Short.MAX   = " + Short.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Integer.MIN = " + Integer.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Integer.MAX = " + Integer.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Long.MIN    = " + Long.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Long.MAX    = " + Long.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Float.MIN   = " + Float.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Float.MAX   = " + Float.MAX_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Double.MIN  = " + Double.MIN_VALUE);
        System.out.println("Double.MAX  = " + Double.MAX_VALUE);
    }
}

The result of the code above shows the minimum and maximum value for each data types.

Byte.MIN    = -128
Byte.MAX    = 127
Short.MIN   = -32768
Short.MAX   = 32767
Integer.MIN = -2147483648
Integer.MAX = 2147483647
Long.MIN    = -9223372036854775808
Long.MAX    = 9223372036854775807
Float.MIN   = 1.4E-45
Float.MAX   = 3.4028235E38
Double.MIN  = 4.9E-324
Double.MAX  = 1.7976931348623157E308

How do I convert String into Date Object in Java?

The following code shows how we can convert a string representation of date into java.util.Date object.

To convert a string of date we can use the help from java.text.SimpleDateFormat that extends java.text.DateFormat abstract class.

package org.kodejava.text;

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
import java.util.Date;

public class ConvertStringToDateExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String pattern = "dd/MM/yyyy";
        String date = "15/09/2021";

        try {
            DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern);
            Date today = df.parse(date);
            System.out.println("Today = " + df.format(today));
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        // Using Java 8 Date and Time
        DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern(pattern);
        LocalDate localDate = LocalDate.parse(date, formatter);
        System.out.println("Today = " + localDate.format(formatter));
    }
}

And here is the result of our code:

Today = 15/09/2021
Today = 15/09/2021

The example starts by creating an instance of SimpleDateFormat with dd/MM/yyyy format which mean that the date string is formatted in day-month-year sequence.

Finally, using the parse(String source) method we can get the Date instance. Because parse method can throw java.text.ParseException exception if the supplied date is not in a valid format; we need to catch it.

Here are the list of defined patterns that can be used to format the date taken from the Java class documentation.

Letter Date / Time Component Examples
G Era designator AD
y Year 1996; 96
M Month in year July; Jul; 07
w Week in year 27
W Week in month 2
D Day in year 189
d Day in month 10
F Day of week in month 2
E Day in week Tuesday; Tue
a Am/pm marker PM
H Hour in day (0-23) 0
k Hour in day (1-24) 24
K Hour in am/pm (0-11) 0
h Hour in am/pm (1-12) 12
m Minute in hour 30
s Second in minute 55
S Millisecond 978
z Time zone Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z Time zone -0800

How do I compare if two arrays are equal?

Using Arrays.equals() methods we can compare if two arrays are equal. Two arrays are considered to be equal if their length, each element in both arrays are equal and in the same order to one another.

package org.kodejava.util;

import java.util.Arrays;

public class CompareArrayExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String[] abc = {"Kode", "Java", "Dot", "Org"};
        String[] xyz = {"Kode", "Java", "Dot", "Org"};
        String[] java = {"Java", "Dot", "Com"};

        System.out.println(Arrays.equals(abc, xyz));
        System.out.println(Arrays.equals(abc, java));
    }
}

The Arrays.equals() can be used to compare array of any primitive data type and array of Object. If you run this example you will have a result as follows:

true
false

How do I convert primitive data types into String?

There are times when we want to convert data from primitive data types into a string, for instance when we want to format output on the screen or simply mixing it with other string. Using a various static method String.valueOf() we can get a string value of them.

Here is the code sample:

package org.kodejava.lang;

public class StringValueOfExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        boolean b = false;
        char c = 'c';
        int i = 100;
        long l = 100000;
        float f = 3.4f;
        double d = 500.99;

        String u = String.valueOf(b);
        String v = String.valueOf(c);
        String w = String.valueOf(i);
        String x = String.valueOf(l);
        String y = String.valueOf(f);
        String z = String.valueOf(d);
    }
}

When called with boolean argument the String.valueOf() method return true or false string depending on the boolean argument value. When called with char argument, a 1 length sized string returned.

For int, long, float, double the results are the same as calling Integer.toString(), Long.toString(), Float.toString() and Double.toString() respectively.