Dates and Times - Beginning Java 8 Fundamentals - page 466

LocalDate ld = LocalDate.of(2014, 12, 25);
String pattern = "'Christmas in' yyyy 'is on' EEEE";
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern(pattern);
String str = ld.format(formatter);
System.out.println(str);

Christmas in 2014 is on Thursday

Parsing Dates and Times
Parsing is the process of creating a date, time, or datetime object from a string. Like formatting, parsing is also handled
by a DateTimeFormatter . Please refer to the previous section, “Formatting Dates and Times,” for details on how to get
an instance of the DateTimeFormatter class. The same symbols used for formatting are also used as parsing symbols.
There are two ways to parse a string into a datetime object:

• Using the

parse() method of the datetime class

parse() method of the DateTimeFormatter class • Using the

■ a DateTimeParseException is thrown if the text cannot be parsed. it is a runtime exception. the class contains
two methods to provide the error details. the getErrorIndex() method returns the index in the text where the error
occurred. the getParsedString() method returns the text being parsed. it is good practice to handle this exception
while parsing a datetime.

Tip

Each datetime class has two overloaded versions of the parse() static method. The return type of the parse()
method is the same as the defining datetime class. The following are the two version of the parse() method in
LocalDate class:

static LocalDate parse(CharSequence text)

•

static LocalDate parse(CharSequence text, DateTimeFormatter formatter)
The first version of the parse() method takes the textual representation of the datetime object in ISO format.
For example, for a LocalDate , the text should be in the yyyy-mm-dd format. The second version lets you specify a
DateTimeFormatter . The following snippet of code parses two strings into two LocalDate objects:

•

// Parse a LocalDate in ISO format
LocalDate ld1 = LocalDate.parse("2014-01-10");
// Parse a LocalDate in MM/dd/yyyy format
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("MM/dd/yyyy");
LocalDate ld2 = LocalDate.parse("01/10/2014", formatter);
System.out.println("ld1: " + ld1);
System.out.println("ld2: " + ld2);

ld1: 2014-01-10
ld2: 2014-01-10