Convert String to Date in Java

In this lesson, you will learn to convert String to LocalDate and LocalDateTime objects.

LocalDate and LocalDateTime are immutable date-time objects representing a date and a date and time. To convert String to one of the two Date objects, the provided String must represent a valid date or time according to ISO_LOCAL_DATE or ISO_LOCAL_DATE_TIME.  Otherwise, a DateTimeParseException will be thrown.

For more information on Java exception handling, check out this tutorial: Exception Handling in Java.

Convert String to the LocalDate in Java

In this example, we use the parse() method of the LocalDate class to parse the provided String.

import java.time.LocalDate;

class Test {

  public static void main(String[] args) {

    LocalDate date = LocalDate.parse("2021-08-20");

    System.out.println(date.toString());
  }
}

Example

import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;

class Test {

  public static void main(String[] args) {

    String stringDate = "August 20, 2021";
    DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("MMMM d, yyyy", Locale.ENGLISH);
    LocalDate dateTime = LocalDate.parse(stringDate, formatter);

    System.out.println(dateTime.toString());
  }
}

Parse String to the LocalDateTime in Java

Here, we use the parse() method of the LocalDateTime class to convert the provided String to LocalDateTime.

import java.time.LocalDateTime;
class Test {

  public static void main(String[] args) {

    LocalDateTime dateTime = LocalDateTime.parse("2021-08-20T09:50:52");

    System.out.println(dateTime.toString());
  }
}

Example

import java.time.LocalDateTime;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;

class Test {

  public static void main(String[] args) {

    String dateTimeString = "2018-05-05 11:50:55";

    DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");

    LocalDateTime localDateTime = LocalDateTime.parse(dateTimeString, formatter);

    System.out.println(localDateTime.toString());
  }
}