Formatting Data - Beginning Java 8 Fundamentals - page 481

Table 13-2. List of Formatting Symbols for Formatting Date and Time

Letter Date or Time Component Presentation Examples

G Era designator Text AD

y Year Year 2003; 03

Y Week-based year Year 2003; 03

M Month in year Month March; Mar; 03

w Week in year Number 27

W Week in month Number 2

D Day in year Number 189

d Day in month Number 10

F Day of week in month Number 2

E Day in week Text Tuesday; Tue

a AM/PM marker Text PM

H Hour in day (0-23) Number 0

k Hour in day (1-24) Number 24

K Hour in AM/PM (0-11) Number 0

h Hour in AM/PM (1-12) Number 12

m Minute in hour Number 30

s Second in minute Number 55

S Millisecond Number 978

z Time zone General time zone Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00

Z Time zone RFC 822 time zone -0800

You can embed literals inside formatted dates. Suppose you have your birth date (September 19, 1969) stored in
a date object and now you want to print it as “I was born on the Day 19 of the month September in 1969”. Some parts
in the message come from the birth date and others are literals, which are intended to appear in the message as they
are. You cannot use any alphabet's a-z and A-Z as literals inside a date pattern. You need to place them inside single
quotes to treat them as literals, not part of the formatting pattern. First, you need a Date object to represent
September 19, 1969. The Date class' constructor, which takes year, month, and day, has been deprecated. Let's start
with the GregorianCalendar class and use its getTime() method to get a Date object. The following snippet of code
prints this message:

// Create a GregorianCalendar object with September 19, 1969 as date
GregorianCalendar gc = new GregorianCalendar(1969,
Calendar.SEPTEMBER,19);

// Get date object
Date birthDate = gc.getTime();

// Create the pattern. You must place literals inside single quotes
String pattern = "'I was born on the day' dd 'of the month' MMMM 'in' yyyy";