Convert and format a Date in JSP

Question

From my JSP Page, I am getting Date in this format.

Fri May 13 2011 19:59:09 GMT 0530 (India Standard Time)

How can I convert this to the pattern yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss?

Answer 1

In JSP, you'd normally like to use JSTL <fmt:formatDate> for this. You can of course also throw in a scriptlet with SimpleDateFormat, but scriptlets are strongly discouraged since 2003.

Assuming that ${bean.date} returns java.util.Date, here's how you can use it:

<%@ taglib prefix="fmt" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/fmt" %>
...
<fmt:formatDate value="${bean.date}" pattern="yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" />

If you're actually using a java.util.Calendar, then you can invoke its getTime() method to get a java.util.Date out of it that <fmt:formatDate> accepts:

<fmt:formatDate value="${bean.calendar.time}" pattern="yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" />

Or, if you're actually holding the date in a java.lang.String (this indicates a serious design mistake in the model; you should really fix your model to store dates as java.util.Date instead of as java.lang.String!), here's how you can convert from one date string format e.g. MM/dd/yyyy to another date string format e.g. yyyy-MM-dd with help of JSTL <fmt:parseDate>.

<fmt:parseDate pattern="MM/dd/yyyy" value="${bean.dateString}" var="parsedDate" />
<fmt:formatDate value="${parsedDate}" pattern="yyyy-MM-dd" />