PHP's strtotime() in Java

Question

strtotime() in PHP can do the following transformations:

Inputs:

strtotime(’2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00′);
strtotime(’Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200′);
str         


        

Answer 1

Use a Calendar and format the result with SimpleDateFormat:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Calendar.html

    Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance();
    Calendar working;
    SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("E yyyy.MM.dd 'at' hh:mm:ss a zzz");

    working = (Calendar) now.clone();

    //strtotime("-2 years")
    working.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR, - (365 * 2));
    System.out.println("  Two years ago it was: " + formatter.format(working.getTime()));

    working = (Calendar) now.clone();

    //strtotime("+5 days");
    working.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR, + 5);
    System.out.println("  In five days it will be: " + formatter.format(working.getTime()));

Fine, it's significantly more verbose than PHP's strtotime(), but at the end of the day, it's the functionality you're after.