Calculate elapsed time in Java / Groovy

Question

I have...

 Date start = new Date()  ... ... ...  Date stop = new Date() 

I'd like to get the years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds ellapsed between these two dates.

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I'll refine the question.

I just want to get the elapsed time, as an absolute measure, that is without taking into account leap years, the days of each month, etc.

Thus I think it's impossible to get the years and months elapsed, all I can get is days, hours, minutes and seconds.

More specifically I want to tell that a certain task lasted for e.g.

20 sec 13 min, 4 sec 2 h, 10 min, 2 sec 4 d, 4 h, 2 min, 2 sec 

So please forgive my lack of precision.

Answer 1

I've just discovered this quick Groovy-sourced solution:

import groovy.time.TimeCategory  import groovy.time.TimeDuration  Date start = new Date()  // do something here  Date stop = new Date()  TimeDuration td = TimeCategory.minus( stop, start ) println td