How to determine the time between now and an arbitrary future date in Java

Question

I\'m currently trying to determine the amount of time between two dates (one of which is the present date/time, the other an arbitrary future date). I\'m using native Java a

Answer 1

Instead of doing this :

 long x = difference / 1000;
seconds = x % 60;
x /= 60;
minutes = x % 60;
x /= 60;
hours = x % 24;
x /= 24;
days = x;

build a Date object with the difference between the two dates (long value). Then you can do a setDate(Date) on a Calendar object and parse it.

Alternatively, you can take a look at the Joda Time Api, which is relatively easy to use.