| Factory that creates instances of DateTimeFormatter from patterns and styles.
Datetime formatting is performed by the
DateTimeFormatter class.
Three classes provide factory methods to create formatters, and this is one.
The others are
ISODateTimeFormat and
DateTimeFormatterBuilder .
This class provides two types of factory:
For example, to use a patterm:
DateTime dt = new DateTime();
DateTimeFormatter fmt = DateTimeFormat.forPattern("MMMM, yyyy");
String str = fmt.print(dt);
The pattern syntax is mostly compatible with java.text.SimpleDateFormat -
time zone names cannot be parsed and a few more symbols are supported.
All ASCII letters are reserved as pattern letters, which are defined as follows:
Symbol Meaning Presentation Examples
------ ------- ------------ -------
G era text AD
C century of era (>=0) number 20
Y year of era (>=0) year 1996
x weekyear year 1996
w week of weekyear number 27
e day of week number 2
E day of week text Tuesday; Tue
y year year 1996
D day of year number 189
M month of year month July; Jul; 07
d day of month number 10
a halfday of day text PM
K hour of halfday (0~11) number 0
h clockhour of halfday (1~12) number 12
H hour of day (0~23) number 0
k clockhour of day (1~24) number 24
m minute of hour number 30
s second of minute number 55
S fraction of second number 978
z time zone text Pacific Standard Time; PST
Z time zone offset/id zone -0800; -08:00; America/Los_Angeles
' escape for text delimiter
'' single quote literal '
The count of pattern letters determine the format.
Text: If the number of pattern letters is 4 or more,
the full form is used; otherwise a short or abbreviated form is used if
available.
Number: The minimum number of digits. Shorter numbers
are zero-padded to this amount.
Year: Numeric presentation for year and weekyear fields
are handled specially. For example, if the count of 'y' is 2, the year
will be displayed as the zero-based year of the century, which is two
digits.
Month: 3 or over, use text, otherwise use number.
Zone: 'Z' outputs offset without a colon, 'ZZ' outputs
the offset with a colon, 'ZZZ' or more outputs the zone id.
Zone names: Time zone names ('z') cannot be parsed.
Any characters in the pattern that are not in the ranges of ['a'..'z']
and ['A'..'Z'] will be treated as quoted text. For instance, characters
like ':', '.', ' ', '#' and '?' will appear in the resulting time text
even they are not embraced within single quotes.
DateTimeFormat is thread-safe and immutable, and the formatters it returns
are as well.
author:
Brian S O'Neill
author:
Maxim Zhao
since:
1.0
See Also: ISODateTimeFormat
See Also: DateTimeFormatterBuilder | 