How to Get Today's Date in Java

1. Get Today’s Date Using LocalDate in Java
2. Get Today’s Date Using Calender and SimpleDateFormat in Java
3. Get Today’s Date Using java.sql.Date in Java

This article introduces methods to get today’s date in Java.

Get Today’s Date Using LocalDate in Java

LocalDate is an object that represents a date in the ISO format that is YYYY-MM-DD. As its name indicates, LocalDate only holds a date object but not the current time information.

LocalDate.now() uses the system clock to get the current date in the default time-zone specified in the system. In the output below, we get the date in the ISO format.

import java.time.LocalDate;

public class GetTodayDate {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    LocalDate todaysDate = LocalDate.now();
    System.out.println(todaysDate);
  }
}

Output:

2021-01-03

Get Today’s Date Using Calender and SimpleDateFormat in Java

In the second method, we use Calender to create an object and call the getTime() method that returns the result as a Date object. Our goal is to get today’s date, but the result that we get as a Date tells the current time as well as the time-zone.

We format the dateObj to get only the date using SimpleDateFormat() that takes the format that we want as an argument. We use dtf.format() to format the dateObj and to get the result as a string.

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Date;

public class GetTodayDate {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SimpleDateFormat dtf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd");
    Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();

    Date dateObj = calendar.getTime();
    String formattedDate = dtf.format(dateObj);
    System.out.println(formattedDate);
  }
}

Output:

2021/01/03

Get Today’s Date Using java.sql.Date in Java

The last method is useful if we want to work with databases because java.sql.Date represents the SQL Date that is usually used in databases. The date is calculated as the milliseconds since January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT. The time part is always set to zero, and it returns only the date.

In the example below, we get the current time in milliseconds and pass it to the constructor of Date that returns a Date object. We can see in the output that the date outputs the date in YYYY-MM-DD format.

import java.sql.Date;

public class GetTodayDate {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    long miliseconds = System.currentTimeMillis();
    Date date = new Date(miliseconds);
    System.out.println(date);
  }
}

Output:

2021-01-03