How to format date and time in Android?

Question

How to format correctly according to the device configuration date and time when having a year, month, day, hour and minute?

Answer 1

Avoid j.u.Date

The Java.util.Date and .Calendar and SimpleDateFormat in Java (and Android) are notoriously troublesome. Avoid them. They are so bad that Sun/Oracle gave up on them, supplanting them with the new java.time package in Java 8 (not in Android as of 2014). The new java.time was inspired by the Joda-Time library.

Joda-Time

Joda-Time does work in Android.

Search StackOverflow for "Joda" to find many examples and much discussion.

A tidbit of source code using Joda-Time 2.4.

Standard format.

String output = DateTime.now().toString(); 
// Current date-time in user's default time zone with a String representation formatted to the ISO 8601 standard.

Localized format.

String output = DateTimeFormat.forStyle( "FF" ).print( DateTime.now() ); 
// Full (long) format localized for this user's language and culture.