Date formatting and time calculations.

[Rob Levo]

Need to do the following.
1) convert string date in specific format (ex. "04-30-2003 12:50:47") to unix time
2) subtract off one month - I got that part, lol.
3) convert the new unix time back to date in same specific format as original in step 1.
I have been unable to do this even though it seems like it should be straight forward. I am confused on what classes I should be using.
Thanks for the help!
Rob

[Greg Charles]

You want to use a SimpleDateFormat with the pattern "MM-dd-yyyy hh:mm:ss". The good news is it will do both the parsing and the reformatting for you. Actually it parses the String into java.util.Date, but it's trivially easy to get the long integer representation from that. Remember, it's similar to Unix (same epoch), but it's a signed 64 bit integer expressing the time in milliseconds, not seconds.

[Rob Levo]

Thanks Greg!