Displaying AM and PM in lower case after date formatting

Question

After formatting a datetime, the time displays AM or PM in upper case, but I want it in lower case like am or pm.

This is my code:

public class Timeis {     public static void main(String s[]) {         long ts = 1022895271767L;         String st = null;           st = new SimpleDateFormat(" MMM d 'at' hh:mm a").format(ts);         System.out.println("time is " + ts);       } } 

Answer 1

This works

public class Timeis {     public static void main(String s[]) {         long ts = 1022895271767L;         SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(" MMM d 'at' hh:mm a");         // CREATE DateFormatSymbols WITH ALL SYMBOLS FROM (DEFAULT) Locale         DateFormatSymbols symbols = new DateFormatSymbols(Locale.getDefault());         // OVERRIDE SOME symbols WHILE RETAINING OTHERS         symbols.setAmPmStrings(new String[] { "am", "pm" });         sdf.setDateFormatSymbols(symbols);         String st = sdf.format(ts);         System.out.println("time is " + st);     } } 

Answer 2

Unfortunately the standard formatting methods don't let you do that. Nor does Joda. I think you're going to have to process your formatted date by a simple post-format replace.

String str = oldstr.replace("AM", "am").replace("PM","pm"); 

You could use the replaceAll() method that uses regepxs, but I think the above is perhaps sufficient. I'm not doing a blanket toLowerCase() since that could screw up formatting if you change the format string in the future to contain (say) month names or similar.

EDIT: James Jithin's solution looks a lot better, and the proper way to do this (as noted in the comments)