How to get the current UTC time in seconds

Question

I have an application, which needs to compare the time in seconds.

I want to know how to get the current UTC time in seconds.

Can some one post an example of it how can we do this in Java?

Answer 1

 public static  long getUtcTime(long time) {
    System.out.println("Time="+time);
     SimpleDateFormat format=new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
       Date dbefore=new Date(time);
       System.out.println("Date before conversion="+format.format(dbefore));
      Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance();
       c.setTimeInMillis(time);
          TimeZone timezone = c.getTimeZone();
        int offset = timezone.getRawOffset();
        if(timezone.inDaylightTime(new Date())){
            offset = offset + timezone.getDSTSavings();
        }
        int offsetHrs = offset / 1000 / 60 / 60;
        int offsetMins = offset / 1000 / 60 % 60;

        System.out.println("offset: " + offsetHrs);
        System.out.println("offset: " + offsetMins);

        c.add(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, (-offsetHrs));
        c.add(Calendar.MINUTE, (-offsetMins));

        System.out.println("Date after conversion: "+format.format(c.getTime()));
      System.out.println("Time converted="+c.getTime().getTime());
         return c.getTime().getTime();


    }

Answer 2

Get current UTC time in seconds (since 1.5) :

TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toSeconds(System.currentTimeMillis())

according to Javadoc:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/System.html#currentTimeMillis

Returns:

the difference, measured in milliseconds, between the current time and midnight, January 1, 1970 UTC.