Get difference between two dates in months using Java [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can try this:

Calendar sDate = Calendar.getInstance();
Calendar eDate = Calendar.getInstance();
sDate.setTime(startDate.getTime());
eDate.setTime(endDate.getTime());
int difInMonths = sDate.get(Calendar.MONTH) - eDate.get(Calendar.MONTH);

I think this should work. I used something similar for my project and it worked for what I needed (year diff). You get a Calendar from a Date and just get the month's diff.

Answer 2

If you can't use JodaTime, you can do the following:

Calendar startCalendar = new GregorianCalendar();
startCalendar.setTime(startDate);
Calendar endCalendar = new GregorianCalendar();
endCalendar.setTime(endDate);

int diffYear = endCalendar.get(Calendar.YEAR) - startCalendar.get(Calendar.YEAR);
int diffMonth = diffYear * 12 + endCalendar.get(Calendar.MONTH) - startCalendar.get(Calendar.MONTH);

Note that if your dates are 2013-01-31 and 2013-02-01, you get a distance of 1 month this way, which may or may not be what you want.

Answer 3

You can use Joda time library for Java. It would be much easier to calculate time-diff between dates with it.

Sample snippet for time-diff:

Days d = Days.daysBetween(startDate, endDate);
int days = d.getDays();