Java date format - including additional characters

Is there an equivalent to php date() style formatting in Java? I mean, in php I can backslash-escape characters to have them treated literally. I.e. yyyy \y\e\a\r would become 2010 year. I did not find anything similar in Java, all examples deal only with built-in date formats.

In particular, I deal with JCalendar date pickers and their dateFormatString property.

I need it because in my locale it is required to write all sorts of additional stuff in date format, like d. (for day) after days part, m. (for years) after years part and so on. At the worst case I could use string replace or regexp but maybe there's a simpler way? Thanks in advance!

Sure, with the SimpleDateFormat you can include literal strings:

> Within date and time pattern strings, unquoted letters from 'A' to 'Z' and from 'a' to 'z' are interpreted as pattern letters representing the components of a date or time string. Text can be quoted using single quotes (') to avoid interpretation. "''" represents a single quote. All other characters are not interpreted; they're simply copied into the output string during formatting or matched against the input string during parsing.

 "hh 'o''clock' a, zzzz"  	12 o'clock PM, Pacific Daylight Time

Just for completeness, Java 8's DateTimeFormatter also supports this:

DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy 'year'");

java.time

Mark Jeronimus said it already. I am fleshing it out a bit more. Just put the text to be printed literally inside single quotes.

	DateTimeFormatter yearFormatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy 'year'");
	System.out.println(LocalDate.of(2010, Month.FEBRUARY, 3).format(yearFormatter));
	System.out.println(Year.of(2010).format(yearFormatter));
	System.out.println(ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneId.of("Europe/Vilnius")).format(yearFormatter));

Output when running just now:

> 2010 year > 2010 year > 2019 year

If you are using a DateTimeFormatterBuilder and its appendPattern method, use single quotes in the same way. Or use its appendLiteral method instead and no single quotes.

How do we put a single quote in the format, then? Two single quotes produce one. It doesn’t matter if the double single quote is inside single quotes or not:

	DateTimeFormatter formatterWithSingleQuote = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("H mm'' ss\"");
	System.out.println(LocalTime.now(ZoneId.of("Europe/London")).format(formatterWithSingleQuote));

> 10 28' 34"

	DateTimeFormatter formatterWithSingleQuoteInsideSingleQuotes
			= DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("hh 'o''clock' a, zzzz", Locale.ENGLISH);
	System.out.println(ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneId.of("America/Los_Angeles"))
			.format(formatterWithSingleQuoteInsideSingleQuotes));

> 02 o'clock AM, Pacific Daylight Time

All of the formatters above can be used for parsing too. For example:

	LocalTime time = LocalTime.parse("16 43' 56\"", formatterWithSingleQuote);
	System.out.println(time);

> 16:43:56

The SimpleDateFormat class used when this question was asked nearly 10 years ago is notoriously troublesome and long outdated. I recommend that instead you use java.time, the modern Java date and time API. Which is why I demonstrate just that.

Links

• Oracle tutorial: Date Time explaining how to use java.time.
• Documentation of DateTimeFormatter

You can use String.format as documented in java.util.Formatter:

Calendar c = ...;
String s = String.format("%tY year", c);
// -> s == "2010 year" or whatever the year actually is

java.text.SimpleDateFormat

SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd"); 
String formattedDate = formatter.format(date);

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