Time without date. Help!

[James Hewitt]

I am writing a servlet which takes a value for a particular time from a database. This time is in the form of msec since epoch. What I want to do is convert this to the time of day for display in an html document. I have managed to return the full date/time value in html (i.e. including day, date, year, timezone), but all I actually want is the time of day, not the day/date/year etc. So, for example, I can create an html document with:
"Sun Jul 02 23:00:00 GMT+01:00 2001"
When all I actually want to display is:
"23:00"
Can anyone help me? Some sample code would be really useful.
Thanks in advance,
James

[Art Metzer]

Hi, James.
Try something like this:

import java.text.*;
import java.util.*;
 
public class JustTime {
 
    public static final long MSEC_SINCE_EPOCH = System.currentTimeMillis();
 
    public static void main( String[] args ) {
 
        // Convert the milliseconds since the epoch into a
        // java.util.Date object.
        Date instant = new Date( MSEC_SINCE_EPOCH );
 
        // Set up a simple date format, to give the view
        // of the date object that we want.
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat( "HH:mm" );
 
        // Define the String, time, to be our formatted
        // view of the milliseconds since the epoch.
        String time = sdf.format( instant );
 
        // Print out this "view" of MSEC_SINCE_EPOCH.
        System.out.println( "Time: " + time );
    }
}

Running this code returns

Time: 18:02

but of course, the way I set it up, the specific value you see will depend on when you run it.
For more on java.text.SimpleDateFormat, i.e., what characters you can pass in its constructor's String, click here.
Hope this helps, James.
Art

[James Hewitt]

Sorry it took me a while to get back to you. That's perfect. I'd resorted to using the getMinutes command, but that's depracated and inefficient. Your way is much better.
Thanks,
James