Get Date Object In UTC format in Java

Question

I have written following code. I want to get Date object in UTC format.

I am able to get expected date string in UTC using SimpleDateFormat. But using same SimpleDateFormat object, I am not able to get object in UTC format. It is returning object with IST format.

After searching, I found that Date object doesn't store timestamp info.

How can I get date object in UTC format ?

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.TimeZone;

public class dddd {

    /**
     * @param args
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Input - "[phone]L);
        DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
        formatter.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
        Date date= new Date(1393572325000L);  
        String dateString = formatter.format(date);

        System.out.println("Converted UTC TIME (using Format method) : "+dateString);

        Date date2 =null;
        try {
            date2 = formatter.parse(dateString);
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }


        System.out.println("Parsed Date Object (using Parse method) : "+date2);

        System.out.println("Expected Date Object : Fri Feb 28 07:25:25 UTC 2014");

    }

}

This prints following output :

Input - 1393572325000
Converted UTC TIME (using Format method) : 2014-02-28 07:25:25
Parsed Date Object (using Parse method) : Fri Feb 28 12:55:25 IST 2014
Expected Date Object : Fri Feb 28 07:25:25 UTC 2014

Answer 1

final Date currentTime = new Date();
final SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, MMM d, yyyy hh:mm:ss a z");
sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
System.out.println("UTC time: " + sdf.format(currentTime));