Explain SimpleDateFormat class and its usage in Java.

java.text.SimpleDateFormat concrete class is widely used in Java for parsing (text to date) and formatting of dates (date to text).

SimpleDateFormat enables choosing user defined patterns for date-time formatting. Also the date-time formatter initialized with a default format pattern could be created using either getTimeInstance, getDateInstance or getDateTime Instance methods in DateFormat class.

package com.javatutorials.date;

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

public class SimpleDateFmtExample {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		String pattern = "MM/dd/yyyy";
	SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern);
	try {
		Date date = format.parse("06/21/2016");
		System.out.println(date);

		DateFormat dateFmt = DateFormat.getDateInstance();
		System.out.println(dateFmt.format(date));

	} catch (ParseException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
	// formatting
		System.out.println(format.format(new Date()));
	}

}

Note that the SimpleDateFormat objects are not synchronized. It is always a good practice to create separate format instances for each thread or use ThreadLocal class.

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