How to print the current time and date in ISO date format in java?

Question

I am supposed to send the current date and time in ISO format as given below:

'2018-02-09T13:30:00.000-05:00'

I have written the following code:

Date date = new Date();
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm");
SimpleDateFormat formatter1 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.000'Z'");
System.out.println(formatter.format(date));
System.out.println(formatter1.format(date));

It prints in the following way:

2018-04-30T12:02
2018-04-30T12:02:58.000Z

But it is not printing as the format mentioned above. How can I get the -5:00 as shown in the format and what does it indicate?

Answer 1

In java 8 you can use the new java.time api:

OffsetDateTime now = OffsetDateTime.now();
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME;
System.out.println(formatter.format(now)); // e.g. 2018-04-30T08:43:41.4746758+02:00

---

The above uses the standard ISO data time formatter. You can also truncate to milliseconds with:

OffsetDateTime now = OffsetDateTime.now().truncatedTo(ChronoUnit.MILLIS);

Which yields something like (only 3 digits after the dot):

2018-04-30T08:54:54.238+02:00