Java – Make long value as date and format it in Thymeleaf

datejavathymeleaf

I have this line in my Thymeleaf template.

<td th:text="${activity.loggedTimestamp}"></td>

I want to convert this long value into a date before formatting it. If it was already a date I would have done this:

<td th:text="${#dates.format(activity.loggedTimestamp)}"></td>

But, since its a long value, I want to make it a date first.

I found some related methods in the documentation. But, not matching with my requirements.

/*
 * Create date (java.util.Date) objects from its components
 */
${#dates.create(year,month,day)}
${#dates.create(year,month,day,hour,minute)}
${#dates.create(year,month,day,hour,minute,second)}
${#dates.create(year,month,day,hour,minute,second,millisecond)}

/*
 * Create a date (java.util.Date) object for the current date and time
 */
${#dates.createNow()}

/*
 * Create a date (java.util.Date) object for the current date (time set to 00:00)
 */
${#dates.createToday()}

Best Answer

Quoting ThymeLeaf documentation:

We already mentioned that ${...} expressions are in fact OGNL (Object-Graph Navigation Language) expressions executed on the map of variables contained in the context.

For detailed info about OGNL syntax and features, you should read the OGNL Language Guide at: http://commons.apache.org/ognl/

So you follow that link to the OGNL documentation:

You can create new objects as in Java, with the new operator. One difference is that you must specify the fully qualified class name for classes other than those in the java.lang package.

This is only true with the default ClassResolver in place. With a custom class resolver packages can be mapped in such a way that more Java-like references to classes can be made. Refer to the OGNL Developer's Guide for details on using ClassResolver class (for example, new java.util.ArrayList(), rather than simply new ArrayList()).

OGNL chooses the right constructor to call using the same procedure it uses for overloaded method calls.

Conclusion

You write:

<td th:text="${#dates.format(new java.util.Date(activity.loggedTimestamp))}"></td>

The WHY: dates are objects

In Python, dates are objects. Therefore, when you manipulate them, you manipulate objects, not strings or timestamps.

Any object in Python has TWO string representations:

The regular representation that is used by print can be get using the str() function. It is most of the time the most common human readable format and is used to ease display. So str(datetime.datetime(2008, 11, 22, 19, 53, 42)) gives you '2008-11-22 19:53:42'.
The alternative representation that is used to represent the object nature (as a data). It can be get using the repr() function and is handy to know what kind of data your manipulating while you are developing or debugging. repr(datetime.datetime(2008, 11, 22, 19, 53, 42)) gives you 'datetime.datetime(2008, 11, 22, 19, 53, 42)'.

What happened is that when you have printed the date using print, it used str() so you could see a nice date string. But when you have printed mylist, you have printed a list of objects and Python tried to represent the set of data, using repr().

The How: what do you want to do with that?

Well, when you manipulate dates, keep using the date objects all long the way. They got thousand of useful methods and most of the Python API expect dates to be objects.

When you want to display them, just use str(). In Python, the good practice is to explicitly cast everything. So just when it's time to print, get a string representation of your date using str(date).

One last thing. When you tried to print the dates, you printed mylist. If you want to print a date, you must print the date objects, not their container (the list).

E.G, you want to print all the date in a list :

for date in mylist :
    print str(date)

Note that in that specific case, you can even omit str() because print will use it for you. But it should not become a habit :-)

Practical case, using your code

import datetime
mylist = []
today = datetime.date.today()
mylist.append(today)
print mylist[0] # print the date object, not the container ;-)
2008-11-22

# It's better to always use str() because :

print "This is a new day : ", mylist[0] # will work
>>> This is a new day : 2008-11-22

print "This is a new day : " + mylist[0] # will crash
>>> cannot concatenate 'str' and 'datetime.date' objects

print "This is a new day : " + str(mylist[0]) 
>>> This is a new day : 2008-11-22

Advanced date formatting

Dates have a default representation, but you may want to print them in a specific format. In that case, you can get a custom string representation using the strftime() method.

strftime() expects a string pattern explaining how you want to format your date.

E.G :

print today.strftime('We are the %d, %b %Y')
>>> 'We are the 22, Nov 2008'

All the letter after a "%" represent a format for something:

%d is the day number (2 digits, prefixed with leading zero's if necessary)
%m is the month number (2 digits, prefixed with leading zero's if necessary)
%b is the month abbreviation (3 letters)
%B is the month name in full (letters)
%y is the year number abbreviated (last 2 digits)
%Y is the year number full (4 digits)

etc.

Have a look at the official documentation, or McCutchen's quick reference you can't know them all.

Since PEP3101, every object can have its own format used automatically by the method format of any string. In the case of the datetime, the format is the same used in strftime. So you can do the same as above like this:

print "We are the {:%d, %b %Y}".format(today)
>>> 'We are the 22, Nov 2008'

The advantage of this form is that you can also convert other objects at the same time.
With the introduction of Formatted string literals (since Python 3.6, 2016-12-23) this can be written as

import datetime
f"{datetime.datetime.now():%Y-%m-%d}"
>>> '2017-06-15'

Localization

Dates can automatically adapt to the local language and culture if you use them the right way, but it's a bit complicated. Maybe for another question on SO(Stack Overflow) ;-)

Android – How to format date and time in Android

Use the standard Java DateFormat class.

For example to display the current date and time do the following:

Date date = new Date(location.getTime());
DateFormat dateFormat = android.text.format.DateFormat.getDateFormat(getApplicationContext());
mTimeText.setText("Time: " + dateFormat.format(date));

You can initialise a Date object with your own values, however you should be aware that the constructors have been deprecated and you should really be using a Java Calendar object.