Groovy date format for UTC with milliseconds

Question

I'm having trouble finding a good way of formatting a UTC-time stamp with this format: yyyyMMdd-HH:mm:ss.<three additional digits>

I wasn't able to find any character that represents milliseconds/hundredths, I'm not even sure this is possible, to parse that format that is.

Ideally I'd like to use the parseToStringDate that's part of the Date library.

My plan b is to convert yyyyMMdd-HH:mm:ss to milliseconds and then add the three last digits to that number.

Answer 1

Use yyyyMMdd-HH:mm:ss.SSS

This will get you milliseconds as well.

Test Code:

def now = new Date() println now.format("yyyyMMdd-HH:mm:ss.SSS", TimeZone.getTimeZone('UTC')) 

Answer 2

I would convert it like that:

def now = new Date() println now.format("YYYYMMdd-HH:mm:ss")