Getting the current Instant in a specific TimeZone

Question

I have tried to get the current Instance on a specific timeZone but it does not work as expected. Any idea on how to do this ?

Here is what i did:

Instant.now(Clock.system(ZoneId.of("America/Los_Angeles"))).truncatedTo(ChronoUnit.SECONDS)

However the instant time returned is always UTC. I changed many time the ZoneID and it is always wrong. Please advise.

EDIT:

I'm interacting with an application that generate log with timeStamp and i need to operate over those event. For instant if I start my program with a specific TimeStamp it should start reading event from that TimeStamp. While my laptop is in the same TimeZone as the application that generate those event, when i get Instant.Now() i seem to be in UTC. While the application generate timeStamp according to the TimeZone in which we are. I want the clock of my program to be the same as the one in the Server.

The application generate timestamp of the form 2016-08-04T18:17:51Z

Answer 1

Instant are not Timezone aware. If you need a time zone aware timestamp, you should use ZonedDateTime.

Check out ZonedDateTime.now(timezone) which will use the provided timezone. To use the machine's default timezone, use ZonedDateTime.now()

If you want to parse a ZonedDateTime and override the timezone, you can use ZonedDateTime.withZoneSameLocal or ZonedDateTime.withZoneSameInstant depending on your need.