No. of days between two timestamps - java

I have two timestamp values. like
Timestamp date1;
Timestamp date2;
Now I want to find no. of days between these two timeStamps like in java
int no_of_days = difference(date2 - date1)
the above codes are just for clarification of the question. just ignore the coding mistakes.

You can use Duration for this (it works for java 8) :
Duration between = Duration.between(date1.toInstant(), date2.toInstant());
int no_of_days = between.get(ChronoUnit.DAYS);

If you are using Java8, it will be much easier. Here's a one way of doing it.
Duration.between(date1.toLocalDateTime(), date2.toLocalDateTime()).toDays();

Other answers given here so far only handle a day unit as fixed amount of 24 hours by using the class java.time.Duration. If you consider your timestamps in the context of daylight saving switching time zones then this is probably not what you want.
During the change from winter to summer time, a calendar day can last only 23 hours (or even 23:30 in some rare cases). And in autumn when switching back to winter time, the calendar days can be more than 24 hours long. So you also need a time zone to handle this situation in order to calculate durations in the correct way.
Suggested solution if your timestamps have been stored in the database coming from instants:
ZonedDateTime zdt1 = date1.toInstant().atZone(ZoneId.systemDefault());
ZonedDateTime zdt2 = date2.toInstant().atZone(ZoneId.systemDefault());
long days = java.time.temporal.ChronoUnit.DAYS.between(zdt1, zdt2);
Of course, you are free to specify any other zone than the system time zone. The result can vary depending on the chosen zone.
Suggested solution if your timestamps have been stored coming from LocalDateTime without any zone context:
LocalDateTime ldt1 = date1.toLocalDateTime();
LocalDateTime ldt2 = date2.toLocalDateTime();
long days = java.time.temporal.ChronoUnit.DAYS.between(ldt1, ldt2);
Here I still prefer the enum ChronoUnit.DAYS because the type java.time.Duration internally stores seconds and nanoseconds only and is hence rather designed for machine-like timestamps. And another remark: The second solution implicitly uses your system time zone for the conversion from java.sql.Timestamp to LocalDateTime. This is only correct if you also have stored your timestamps that way.
By the way, with a JDBC-4.2-compliant driver, you could also retrieve your java.time-type directly, see also a related post here on SO.

Related

Timestamp and Timespan equivalent in java.time package at Java 8

Hi I read some article about new java.time package.And some of articles say we shouldnt use java.util.Date family.We can use offsetDateTime or LocalDateTime instead of java.util.Date.
And I am wondering about what should we use instead of Timestamp in new java.time package?
As I check Timestamp use
public class Timestamp extends java.util.Date
There are two types of time spans in Java 8:
Period - represents time difference between two points in years, months, days
Duration - represents a time duration - the actual physical time-span, doesn't depend on what is the start time
For example 1 month "period" will be 30 days in April, 31 in may, so the values might be calculated differently in different contexts. Also time zone changes (daylight saving) are taken into account. Duration of certain number of seconds, minutes, hours, days, will not depend on the context. For example 30 days will always be 30 days.
You have a good description in the doc:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/datetime/iso/period.html
Timestamp equivalent
I am assuming that you are referring to the outdated java.sql.Timestamp and/or to the timestamp (without time zone) and timestamp with time zone datatypes of SQL. The first was designed for use with the last two. The answer is different for the two.
For a timestamp in SQL timestamp with time zone is clearly recommended since it actually unambiguously defines a point in time, which is in the definition of what a timestamp is. For a timestamp with time zone you should use the java.time class that you already mentioned, OffsetDateTime. Some JDBC drivers and JPA implementations will accept Instant too.
In most SQL dialects a mere timestamp is a date and time of day with high resolution (for example microseconds) without time zone. Lacking time zone it does not define a point in time, so calling it a timestamp is really a lie. In any case the corresponding java.time type is the other class you mentioned, LocalDateTime.
All of the mentioned java.time classes have resolution of nanoseconds. I know of no SQL dialect that would demand more than that.
You are fully correct. Not only is java.util.Date poorly designed and long outdated. Timestamp is a true hack on top of that class. I recommend you don’t use any of them.
Timespan equivalent
Artur Olszak in another answer has already nicely given the basis of Period and Duration. There is no need for me to repeat that. As a supplement, please be aware that even though Duration has methods for converting to and from a number of days, it isn’t really well suited for days since it assumes that a day is always 24 hours, which is not always the case because of summer time (DST) and other anomalies. As soon as you need to count days, I recommend either Period or a simple number of days.
Links
Wikipedia article: Timestamp.
My answer to a related quetsion about retrieving an SQL timestamp into a java.time type.

Using localDate with UTC

I'm encountering a problem using LocalDate in UTC. My server uses UTC, and my database uses UTC. I used LocalDate to store a billingDate for a subscription based application.
What happens is that we bill at midnight UTC (when doing comparisions like billingDate <= LocalDate.now()). We actually mean to bill sometime after midnight PST.
I really felt like using LocalDate was appropriate here, because we just want to bill at some point during that day. However, it doesn't seem practical when doing comparisons either directly in the code or in the database (billing_date <= CURRENT_DATE()). Did I make a mistake, should this be a ZonedDateTime in PST? Or should we be converting to ZonedDateTime for comparisons? It feels error prone, we need to remember to convert any time we do a comparision, but perhaps this is the correct solution?
Does anyone have experience with this situation and found a nice solution?
I've taken a look at this question, but it doesn't answer my question: Spring REST LocalDate UTC differs of one day
I suggest that this is just a matter of passing the desired time zone to LocalDate.now(ZoneId).
Use LocalDate.now(ZoneId.of("Asia/Manila")) for Philippine Standard Time. At the moment it yeilds 2019-07-09.
Use LocalDate.now(ZoneId.of("Pacific/Pitcairn")) for Pitcairn Standard Time. It just gave 2019-07-08.
I am assuming that you didn’t mean Pacific Standard Time since no time zone uses Pacific Standard Time as we speak (those that do in winter, are on Pacific Daylight Time now). In any case, mind you that three letter time zone abbreviations are often ambiguous.
The java.time classes that have a now method generally have three overloaded variants of it:
One that takes a ZoneId arguments that I recommend for general use.
One that takes a Clock argument that is great for testability. A Clock includes a time zone, so this one too gets you the current date and/or time in that specified time zone.
One that doesn’t take any arguments and uses the JVM’s default time zone. I recommend that you never use it. It’s nice for the reader to know that you have considered time zone and chosen which one you want. And the default time zone can be changed at any time by any program running in the same JVM, so is not stable enough to rely on for real work.
I feel like you should be using Instants.
I really felt like using LocalDate was appropriate here, because we just want to bill at some point during that day.
Well, no. You do care about the time you bill, because your database cares about the time. It stores the billing time as 00:00 UTC. Since that is an instant in time, I think Instant would be the most suitable choice here. You could use a ZonedDateTime as well, but considering that you are probably getting a java.sql.Date from your database, which has a toInstant method already, using Instants is more convenient.
You can get an instant from a year, month, day like this:
LocalDate ld = LocalDate.of(2019, 7, 8);
Instant i = ld.atStartOfDay(ZoneId.of("America/Los_Angeles")).toInstant();
America/Los_Angeles is PST.

Create company specific timezone for 'working day' in java

I work at a company where part of the work for a day is done in the early hours of the next day (i.e. shipping orders). Now for several processes (mainly reporting), we want to let the 'working day' end at 04:00 the next morning so we get more consistent reporting values per day.
We want this to always be at 04:00 the next morning and since we are affected by daylight saving times in our area (Europe - Netherlands) we effectively want a 4 hour shifted variant of our normal timezone 'Europe/Amsterdam' (in our case).
To make this as easy to use for all applications in our company I would like to create a small library that simply contains the code to provide my coworkers to get a modified instance of TimeZone that does this. That way all normal time/date manipulation methods can be used in conjunction with this special time zone.
I did a deep dive into the standard Java 8 code/Javadoc related to the TimeZone/ZoneInfo instances and at this moment I do not understand what the correct field is to change in the returned TimeZone/ZoneInfo instance.
At this point, my best guess is setting the RawOffset to 4 hours, but I'm not sure.
What is the correct way to achieve my goal?
Update:
I had a look at the suggested LocalTime and as I expected: It needs a timezone definition as being what it should use as "Local" when converting an existing timestamp (usually epoch milliseconds) into the "Local" timezone.
Looking at all these classes seems like I'll be using the LocalDate more often than the LocalTime.
Effectively the code I expect to have is something like this:
long epoch = 1525033875230L; // Obtained from some dataset
LocalDate localDate = LocalDateTime
.ofInstant(Instant.ofEpochMilli(epoch),
ZoneId.of("Europe/Amsterdam"))
.toLocalDate();
Where I expect that I need to change that Zone into the 'right one'.
If I have got that correctly, what you really need is a way to convert a milliseconds value since the epoch to a date in a way where days don’t change a 00:00 but not until 04:00.
static ZoneId zone = ZoneId.of("Europe/Amsterdam");
static LocalTime lastShiftEnds = LocalTime.of(4, 0);
public static LocalDate epochMilliToDate(long epoch) {
ZonedDateTime dateTime = Instant.ofEpochMilli(epoch)
.atZone(zone);
if (dateTime.toLocalTime().isAfter(lastShiftEnds)) { // normal date-time
return dateTime.toLocalDate();
} else { // belonging to previous day’s night shift
return dateTime.toLocalDate().minusDays(1);
}
}
Use for example like this:
long epoch = 1_525_050_875_230L;
System.out.println(Instant.ofEpochMilli(epoch));
LocalDate date = epochMilliToDate(epoch);
System.out.println(date);
Output is:
2018-04-30T01:14:35.230Z
2018-04-29
From printing the Instant you can see that the time is after midnight (really 03:14:35.230 in Amsterdam time zone). And the method has correctly deemed that this time belongs to April 29 rather than April 30.
Perhaps I am missing something? On the other hand, if that were me I’d go quite a long way to avoid inventing a time zone that doesn’t exist in real life. Such a time zone would be bound to confuse your coworkers.

Writing and reading LocalDateTime from file most efficiently

What is the fastest way to write LocalDateTime instance to file and then read it from file and convert it back to LocalDateTime object?
I used to save milliseconds and then convert it to Date object. It looked pretty fast but now I am dealing with Java 8's LocalDateTime and it's not clear what would be most efficient way to save and retrieve it from file.
I don't think using DateTimeFormater is a good idea as it requires more resources to convert it to String and then parse the String.
Time zone is not relevant.
If you want to save the milliseconds and timezone is not important, you can use the java.time.Instant class - with only the LocalDateTime there's no way to get the milliseconds, because this class has no timezone/offset information.
// get the current date
Instant instant = Instant.now();
// get milliseconds (equivalent to java.util.Date.getTime())
long millis = instant.toEpochMilli();
// get Instant from milliseconds
Instant instant = Instant.ofEpochMilli(millis);
If you have a LocalDateTime, though, you can easily convert it to an Instant:
LocalDateTime d = LocalDateTime.now();
Instant instant = d.atOffset(ZoneOffset.UTC).toInstant();
This code obviously assumes that the values in the LocalDateTime correspond to an UTC date and time. To convert the Instant back to a LocalDateTime:
LocalDateTime d = LocalDateTime.ofInstant(instant, ZoneOffset.UTC);
PS: have you measured your system's performance to know if "fast" is really an issue? Anyway, I'm doing things the "standard" way (the most straightforward way based on what the API offers), is that what you want?
Maybe you can think that creating an Instant as an "intermediary" object makes things less "fast" (but you'll need to measure that anyway). If that's the case, you can get the millis from the LocalDateTime directly (assuming that it corresponds to a date and time in UTC):
// get the current date
LocalDateTime d = LocalDateTime.now();
// get milliseconds value
long millis = d.toEpochSecond(ZoneOffset.UTC) * 1000 + d.get(ChronoField.MILLI_OF_SECOND);
// get LocalDateTime from millis
LocalDateTime d = LocalDateTime.ofEpochSecond(millis / 1000, (int) (millis % 1000) * 1000000, ZoneOffset.UTC);
It's important to note that java.time classes have nanoseconds precision, so getting the milliseconds makes you lose this precision.
If you don't want to lose the nanoseconds precision and don't necessarily need to work with the millis value, you can store 2 different numbers (epoch day and nano of day):
// get the current date
LocalDateTime d = LocalDateTime.now();
// get values from LocalDateTime
long epochDay = d.toLocalDate().toEpochDay();
long nanoOfDay = d.toLocalTime().toNanoOfDay();
// save both values to file
// retrieve the LocalDateTime from the values
LocalDateTime d = LocalDateTime.of(LocalDate.ofEpochDay(epochDay), LocalTime.ofNanoOfDay(nanoOfDay));
This doesn't require the conversion to UTC, but it requires 2 numbers instead of one. You might think that creating a LocalDate and a LocalTime makes things slower, but these 2 objects are always created internally by LocalDateTime (in all cases).
Not sure, though, if all this math is "faster" enough than using an Instant. It's a matter of testing to see which one is best for your case.
But for me, the most "efficient" in terms of clarity and code-easy-to-maintain is using an Instant (or using the last approach of epoch day and nano of day). And unless you're dealing with millions of records, I'm not sure if that'll really be a performance issue.
I've made a simple test (run each case above 10 million times), and the last approach (using epoch day and nano of day) seems to be the fastest. But the difference is less than 1 second. Only by running 2 billion times I've got a 20-seconds difference, so if you're dealing with this many records, maybe it's worth it.
Regarding other resources (memory usage, CPU, I/O), I didn't check. But anyway, performance issues are very specific to each environment: depending on how the system is designed, how the system's parts/modules/components interact with each other, and many other factors, you can have different bottlenecks in each situation.
In the end, you'll have to test each approach and see which one performs best in your system. Or you can conclude that it doesn't make a significant difference (and for cases with less than a couple of millions records, maybe it doesn't - but you'll only know after benchmarking it).

Joda Interval losing timezone information

I am defining a Joda interval as follows:
final DateTimeZone fromDtz = DateTimeZone.forID("Europe/Paris");
final DateTime fromDt = DateTime.parse("2013-08-08T01:02:03+0200").withZone(fromDtz);
final DateTimeZone toDtz = DateTimeZone.forID("Europe/London");
final DateTime toDt = DateTime.parse("2013-08-08T01:02:05+0100").withZone(toDtz);
final Interval interval = new Interval(fromDt, toDt);
However it appears that I lose the information on the timezone for the end of the interval. If I do a simple toString() on the interval I receive:
2013-08-08T01:02:03.000+02:00/2013-08-08T02:02:05.000+02:00
which is missing some of the information I'm trying to retain (the specific timezone of the datetime at the end of the interval).
I've wandered through the documentation and source code and it appears that Interval only contains a single chronology. Is there a way to tell Joda to keep both timezones without manually carting around two separate DateTimes?
Fundamentally an interval is the time between two instants - and instants don't have chronologies, time zones etc. They're just points on a universal time line - a number of milliseconds since an epoch. The fact that ReadableInterval exposes getChronology at all is a design flaw, IMO - but there really is only one such chronology. If you're trying to keep more information than that, I believe you'll need to use your own type.
It may be as simple as a start/end pair and a toInterval() method for places where you really want to use the Joda Time Interval methods, but I don't think there's anything built into Joda Time to do what you want.
try using withZoneRetainFields()

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