Java Cookbook

Adding to or Subtracting from a Date or Calendar

Problem

You need to add or subtract a fixed amount to or from a date.

Solution

As we’ve seen, Date has a getTime( ) method that returns the number of seconds since the epoch as a long. To add or subtract, you just do arithmetic on this value. Here’s a code example:

// DateAdd.java 
/** Today's date */ 
Date now = new Date(  ); 
 
long t = now.getTime(  ); 
 
t -= 700*24*60*60*1000; 
 
Date then = new Date(t); 
 
System.out.println("Seven hundred days ago was " + then);

Discussion

A cleaner variant is to use the Calendar’s add( ) method:

import java.text.*;
import java.util.*;

/** DateCalAdd -- compute the difference between two dates.
 */
public class DateCalAdd {
    public static void main(String[] av) {
        /** Today's date */
        Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance(  );

        /* Do "DateFormat" using "simple" format. */
        SimpleDateFormat formatter
            = new SimpleDateFormat ("E yyyy.MM.dd 'at' hh:mm:ss a zzz");
        System.out.println("It is now " + 
            formatter.format(now.getTime(  )));

        now.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR, - (365 * 2));
        System.out.println("Two years ago was " + 
            formatter.format(now.getTime(  )));
    }
}

Running this reports the current date and time, and the date and time two years ago:

> java DateCalAdd
It is now Fri 2000.11.03 at 07:16:26 PM EST
Two years ago was Wed 1998.11.04 at 07:16:26 PM EST