Formatting Dates

It's very easy to use the SimpleDateFormat from the java.text API to format a date variable:

Date currentDate = new Date();
SimpleDateFormat formatter = 
     new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd");

System.out.println("Date without any format: "
     + currentDate);

System.out.println("Our beautiful formatted date: "
     + formatter.format(currentDate));

Explaining the code:

• First we instantiated a variable called currentDate using the default constructor of the java.util.Date class, which creates a Date object with the value as the current date and time
• Then we got a instance of the SimpleDateFormat class, specifying the pattern "yyyy/MM/dd" which means year with four digits, month with two digits (01 to 12) and day of the month with two digits (01 to 31).
• We displayed on the console the currentDate variable (we used the default toString() method to display the variable value)
• Then we displayed the formatted value using the method format of the SimpleDateFormat class

You may find more information at:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html