How to get current moment in ISO 8601 format with date, hour, and minute?

Question

What is the most elegant way to get ISO 8601 formatted presentation of the current moment, UTC? It should look like: 2010-10-12T08:50Z.

Example:

String d = DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance(DateFormat.ISO_8601).format(date); `` 

Answer 1

Use SimpleDateFormat to format any Date object you want:

TimeZone tz = TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"); DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm'Z'"); // Quoted "Z" to indicate UTC, no timezone offset df.setTimeZone(tz); String nowAsISO = df.format(new Date()); 

Using a new Date() as shown above will format the current time.

Answer 2

For systems where the default Time Zone is not UTC:

TimeZone tz = TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"); DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm'Z'"); df.setTimeZone(tz); String nowAsISO = df.format(new Date()); 

The SimpleDateFormat instance may be declared as a global constant if needed frequently, but beware that this class is not thread-safe. It must be synchronized if accessed concurrently by multiple threads.

EDIT: I would prefer Joda Time if doing many different Times/Date manipulations...
EDIT2: corrected: setTimeZone does not accept a String (corrected by Paul)