Getting current Time in Groovy

[Kim Kantola]

Hi All,
I am VERY new to Groovy, and am trying to get a current Time value. My code does execute, but I am not sure I am getting the correct value.
What I want to do is get the current Date/Time in UTC, which I understand should be roughly the same as GMT.
I am running this code on a machine that is in Eastern Standard time. So, assuming it is 5:00 PM here, which is (UTC-4 with DST), I would think that my method
should return 9:00 PM as the current time.
However, I get the value 5:00 PM returned. Maybe something in Groovy/Grails is switching the value to the current system time zone?
I am guessing that I must be missing something in the big picture here. Thanks for any advice!!!

  def Date getNowUTC(){
      Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
      cal.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
      System.out.println(cal.toString());
      Date now = cal.getTime();
      return now;
    }

Kim

[Kim Kantola]

Hi,
Still researching this and I realize that I may be attacking the problem the wrong way. When I do a Date now = new Date();, I wanted to make sure now was in UTC, which I now read is the default for the java.util.Date object.
So, as long as I make my Date objects myself, they are in UTC.

So, I guess my question is more in comparing dates, if I create Date now = new Date();

And then a user passes a String value to my program of "March 18, 2010 1:05 PM PST",

and I want to convert that String to a date and then find the difference between the two dates, How would I make sure I am not comparing apples to oranges ?

For example I want to say now - (Date value of String 1:05 PM PST) = some value.

I would want the calculation to return the same elapsed time if an equivalent PST or EST string was passed to the program .

Thanks, this is hurting my brain!
Kim

[David Newton]

Use the Calendar class; it accepts timezones.