Calculation of months between two dates

[Vijay Chandran]

Dear friends,

I have the following two date formats:

Date1: Sun Nov 04 00:00:00 IST 2007
Date2: Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 IST 2008


How to calculate the difference between these two dates in months?
Any special formatting needed using SimpleDateFormat?

I don't know how to use the Calendar class with the above date format.

Kindly provide your help

Regards,
Vijay

[Prashant Ladha]

You dint mention what type of object these dates are stored in.

But anyways, I could think of this formula which would return you the number of months between two dates.

((YYYY*12)+MM) - ((YYYY*12)+MM)

Do let me know if it works.

[Ulf Dittmer]

That depends on how you define the number of months between two dates. In the example you provide 1, 2 and 3 are all valid answers, according to different definitions. Which one do you use?

The SimpleDateFormat class helps with converting dates into string and vice versa; it does not perform any date calculations.