How can I get the current date and time in UTC or GMT in Java?
date, gmt, java, localization, timezone
Solution
`java.util.Date` has no specific time zone, although its value is most commonly thought of in relation to UTC. What makes you think it's in local time?
To be precise: the value within a `java.util.Date` is the number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch, which occurred at midnight January 1st 1970, UTC. The same epoch could also be described in other time zones, but the traditional description is in terms of UTC. As it's a number of milliseconds since a fixed epoch, the value within `java.util.Date` is the same around the world at any particular instant, regardless of local time zone.
I suspect the problem is that you're displaying it via an instance of Calendar which uses the local timezone, or possibly using `Date.toString()` which also uses the local timezone, or a `SimpleDateFormat` instance, which, by default, also uses local timezone.
If this isn't the problem, please post some sample code.
I would, however, recommend that you use Joda-Time anyway, which offers a much clearer API.
Problem
When I create a new `Date` object, it is initialized to the current time but in the local timezone. How can I get the current date and time in GMT?
Related problems
- How to get the current date and time of your timezone in Java?
- Is java.sql.Timestamp timezone specific?
- Java Convert GMT/UTC to Local time doesn't work as expected
- How to get the current date/time in Java
- Before writing a Java Date to an SQL TIMESTAMP column, does JDBC translate the date from the JVM time zone to the database session time zone?
- Get GMT Time in Java