How do I say 5 seconds from now in Java?

Question

I am looking at the Date documentation and trying to figure out how I can express NOW + 5 seconds. Here\'s some pseudocode:

import java.util.Date
public clas         


        

Answer 1

UPDATE: See my new Answer using java.time classes. I am leaving this Answer intact as history.

---

The Answer by Pascal Thivent and the Answer by Jon Skeet are both correct and good. Here's a bit of extra info.

Five Seconds = PT5S (ISO 8601)

Another way to express the idea of "five seconds later" is in a string using the standard formats defined by ISO 8601. The duration/period format has this pattern PnYnMnDTnHnMnS where the P marks the beginning and the T separates the date portion from time portion.

So five seconds is PT5S.

Joda-Time

The Joda-Time 2.8 library can both generate and parse such duration/period strings. See the Period, Duration, and Interval classes. You can add and subtract Period objects to/from DateTime objects.

Search StackOverflow for many examples and discussions. Here's one quick example.

DateTimeZone zone = DateTimeZone.forID( "America/Montreal" );
DateTime now = DateTime.now( zone );
DateTime then = now.plusSeconds( 5 );
Interval interval = new Interval( now, then );
Period period = interval.toPeriod( );

DateTime thenAgain = now.plus( period );

Dump to console.

System.out.println( "zone: " + zone );
System.out.println( "From now: " + now + " to then: " + then );
System.out.println( "interval: " + interval );
System.out.println( "period: " + period );
System.out.println( "thenAgain: " + thenAgain );

When run.

zone: America/Montreal
From now: 2015-06-15T19:38:21.242-04:00 to then: 2015-06-15T19:38:26.242-04:00
interval: 2015-06-15T19:38:21.242-04:00/2015-06-15T19:38:26.242-04:00
period: PT5S
thenAgain: 2015-06-15T19:38:26.242-04:00