java display Windows UTC time - java

Windows stores FileTime internally as the number of 100-nanoseconds since 1.1.1601 UTC as a 64bit field, is it possible to get java to print out the current number? Just looking for an example as I can't find a way to do it. I would like to print the number out?
Any help woudl be greatful!
Thanks.

Approximately
long diff1601to1970 = 315532800 * 1000000000; // <-- diff in nanoseconds(1/1/1601 to 1/1/1970)
long currentFrom1970 = System.currentTimeMillis() * 1000000;
long currentFrom1601 = diff1601to1970 + currentFrom1970;

Java doesn't provide direct access to a raw file time, so if you ask for the lastModified time
someFile.lastModified();
You will get the time the file was last modified, measured in milliseconds since the epoch (00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970), or 0L if the file does not exist or if an I/O error occurs
Not every platform tracks the "same" times in relation to a file, and how they track it internally is different. Part of Java's attempt to make a coherent platform out of the differing standards uses polymorphism to translate the platform specific times to the "java standard" under the covers.
Now to convert the millis returned to a java time:
java.util.Date date = new java.util.Date(millis);
From there you can use the standard i/o routines to display and format the date (DateFormat, etc.)
PS. 1/1/1601 was chosen as the epoch by COBOL initially and mimicked by Microsoft (and possibly others). The reason it was chosen is because it's the start of the 400 year Gregorian Calendar cycle at the time the operating system was released. Every 400 years, the pattern of leap years repeats itself.

Related

Equivalent of Erlang now() in Java

I am working on a project which requires timestamps for running threads. In Erlang, when we do now() we get something like
{1529,709564,578215} which represent {megaseconds, seconds, microseconds}
since epoch. So, for two processes spawned at the same time, I can get same microseconds value. Is there a way to replicate this function in Java?
I know about Date.getTime() which gives us the milliseconds since epoch time, but it does not serve the purpose since I cannot get a unique microsecond value from it after dividing by order of magnitude.
Any alternative?
System.out.println(Instant.now());
Output just now was:
2018-06-23T05:16:45.768006Z
On the Java 10 on my Mac it gave microsecond precision. Since Java 9 it will on many operating systems, maybe not all. Instant.now() returns an Instant. An Instant is implemented as seconds and nanoseconds since the epoch, and you can get out those individually if you want.

Is TimeZone.getDSTSavings() in java returns always positive value?

Is TimeZone.getDSTSavings() in java returns always positive value or Negative values also?
I have tried this way
long millisecondsForGivenDateTime = 0l;
if (TimeZone.getTimeZone(strTZID).inDaylightTime(
new Date(millisecondsForGivenDateTime))) {
millisecondsForGivenDateTime = (millisecondsForGivenDateTime + TimeZone
.getTimeZone(strTZID).getDSTSavings());
}
here strTZID is timezone id dynamically passed to this function and millisecondsForGivenDateTime contains the dynamic value.
I am always getting 3600000 or 0 won't this function return -3600000?
In theory it could return a negative value - if you were using a TimeZone subclass where daylight saving time caused clocks to go back rather than forward.
I very much doubt you'll see that in the wild, although I have seen something similar in the Windows time zone database to get around the fact that Windows couldn't cope with time zones changing their standard UTC offset... if a zone went from UTC+5 to UTC+6 (as standard time) for example - and stopped observing DST - the zone data indicated that "DST" was actually -1 hour, and just inverted when it was in effect from what humans would expect. I've seen this with the Russian time zone, although I believe the data is cleaner now.
The desktop JRE prevents you from constructing a SimpleTimeZone with negative DST savings, but I don't know whether the same (undocumented) limitation is present in Android. You could always create your own subclass of TimeZone which did return a negative offset though.
This class returns 3600000 (1 hour) for time zones that use daylight savings time and 0 for timezones that do not, leaving it to subclasses to override this method for other daylight savings offsets.
If it were returning both positive and negative values, that would cause a two hour difference between the seasons.

subtracting time in Java

Hello I am trying to create a teacher utility to port over to android OS. However I am running into a little trouble. I would like to create a class called Period. This class would contain the start and end time of that period. ie. Period one starts at 7:45 and ends at 8:45. I would also like to have a method for time left in period. for example it is now 8:10 and there are 35 minutes left. I am able to get the current time from System.currentTimeMillis(). However I am having trouble trying to figure out the best way to store the start and end time of the periods. i have taken a look at the Calendar class in Java and it seems like time is always tied to a date as well as a time. This does not seem to make seance for my application since the end time of the period happens on multiple days and not just on one particular date. Any help understanding this would be a great help. Thanks all
If your goal is to be able to compare the start and end time of the period with the current time, then you need a way to compute the date and time of the period's bounds for today.
So get a Calendar instance for today, set its time to 7:45, and compare the time of the calendar with the current time (same for the upper bound, of course).
To represent each bound, you could simply use an int for the hours and a second int for the minutes.
Check out the JodaTime library. The DateTime object has what you want.
Take a look at JodaTime.
Specifically, Period: http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/key_period.html
Calendar is a king of wrapper around the class Date which has mostly deprecated functions. I've heard that the JodoTime API is great for comparing two timestamps (http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/).
One way to store the start and end time for the periods would be to instantiate an ArrayList of dates so you can compare any given time to the lesson periods.
From what I can tell, you should store the time as a number of seconds (optionally milliseconds) from last midnight. Thus, your period one, 7.45, starts at 45*60 (45 minutes * 60 seconds per minute) + 7*60*60 (7 hours times minutes times seconds!) = 2 700 + 25 200 = 27 900.
Do the same calculation for your end date, and as long as they begin and end on the same day, you can easily subtract the difference and thus get the interval in between. If they do not happen on the same date, then Java's time and date classes are both excellent and a must. These classes essentially work the same algorithm, but do not count the seconds from "last midnight", instead they count the amount of milliseconds from the UNIX epoch time (1 January 1970).

How to determine if a timestamp is within working hours?

Given a any unix timestamp (i.e. 1306396801) which translates to 26.05.2011 08:00:01, how can I determine if this is within a given timeframe (i.e. 08:00:00 and 16:00:00)?
This needs to work for any day. I just want to know if this timestamp is within the given time-interval, on any future (or past) day, the date is unimportant. I don't care if it is on the 25th or 26th, as long as it is between 08:00 and 16:00.
I am on the lookout for a java solution, but any pseudo code that works will be ok, I'll just convert it.
My attempts so far has been converting it to a java Calendar, and reading out the hour/min/sec values and comparing those, but that just opened up a big can of worms. If the time interval I want it between is 16.30, I can't just check for tsHour > frameStartHour && tsMin > frameStartMin as this will discard any timestamps that got a minute part > 30.
Thank you for looking at this :)
To clarify.
I am only using and referring to UTC time, my timestamp is in UTC, and the range I want it within is in UTC.
I think I understand what you want. You want to test for any day, if it's between 8am and 4pm UTC. Take the timestamp mod 24*3600. This will give you the number of seconds elapsed in the day. Then you just compare that it's between 8*3600 and 16*3600. If you need to deal with timezones, things get more complicated.
Given your timestamp (in seconds) and the desired time zone, Jodatime gives you the hour which leads you to a simple integer range check.
new org.joda.time.DateTime(timestamp*1000L, zone).getHourOfDay()
With java.util.* its more difficult.
If I understood you correctly, you only need to normalize your dates to some common value. Create three instances of Calendar - one with your time, but day, month, and year set to zero, and two with start and end of your timeframe, other fields also zeroed. Then you can use Calendar.after() and Calendar.before() to see if the date is within the range.
Your unix timestamp is an absolute time. Your time frame is relative. You need some kind of time zone information in order to solve this problem. I just answered some of this for PostgreSQL a few minutes ago. Hopefully that article is of use.
Convert the beginning of your range to a unix timestamp, and the end of your range to a unix tmestamp, then it's a simple integer check.

Is java.util.Date using TimeZone?

I have 2 different computers, each with different TimeZone.
In one computer im printing System.currentTimeMillis(), and then prints the following command in both computers:
System.out.println(new Date(123456)); --> 123456 stands for the number came in the currentTimeMillis in computer #1.
The second print (though typed hardcoded) result in different prints, in both computers.
why is that?
How about some pedantic detail.
java.util.Date is timezone-independent. Says so right in the javadoc.
You want something with respect to a particular timezone? That's java.util.Calendar.
The tricky part? When you print this stuff (with java.text.DateFormat or a subclass), that involves a Calendar (which involves a timezone). See DateFormat.setTimeZone().
It sure looks (haven't checked the implementation) like java.util.Date.toString() goes through a DateFormat. So even our (mostly) timezone-independent class gets messed up w/ timezones.
Want to get that timezone stuff out of our pure zoneless Date objects? There's Date.toGMTString(). Or you can create your own SimpleDateFormatter and use setTimeZone() to control which zone is used yourself.
why is that?
Because something like "Oct 4th 2009, 14:20" is meaningless without knowing the timezone it refers to - which you can most likely see right now, because that's my time as I write this, and it probably differs by several hours from your time even though it's the same moment in time.
Computer timestamps are usually measured in UTC (basically the timezone of Greenwich, England), and the time zone has to be taken into account when formatting them into something human readable.
Because that milliseconds number is the number of milliseconds past 1/1/1970 UTC. If you then translate to a different timezone, the rendered time will be different.
e.g. 123456 may correspond to midday at Greenwich (UTC). But that will be a different time in New York.
To confirm this, use SimpleDateFormat with a time zone output, and/or change the timezone on the second computer to match the first.
javadoc explains this well,
System.currentTimeMillis()
Note that while the unit of time of the return value is a millisecond, the granularity of the value depends on the underlying operating system and may be larger. For example, many operating systems measure time in units of tens of milliseconds.
See https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Date.html#toString().
Yes, it's using timezones. It should also print them out (the three characters before the year).

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