How to format now()?

🚧 Developers Coding Questions
1

rat hole alert! that sign goes off all the time now trying to learn this language... so... can someone please show me, in two lines, how to take "now()", which I know is epoch, and return a string formatted as "Wed Jan 17 19:33:40", without using toString, because I have a workaround using that value. Thanks!

2

Can you just use

new Date()

If you need the date in that specific format you will need to also use SimpleDateFormat. You might find this article useful:

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3

This should be close

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(“EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss”)
dateString = sdf.format(now())
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4

I've got this in my Utilities Library:

String nowFormatted() {
  if(location.timeZone) return new Date().format('yyyy-MMM-dd h:mm:ss a', location.timeZone)
  else                  return new Date().format('yyyy-MMM-dd h:mm:ss a')
}

Date.format() takes formatter parameter for a date that are the same as probably 99% of languages currently in use. As @thebearmay said, "EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss" would what you want.

I recommend putting it into a library that you can use throughout your apps and drivers, so you can easily re-use it.

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5

Thank you all! I was really close, just missing the parens. Its this goofy syntax and all these different methods and classes that makes it difficult for a newbie. I try stuff from the good doc I find online only to find out it doesn't work because i don't have the class defined and then i go to import it and its not available. So whats a newbie to do? Ask guys like you! Thanks again...

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6

When in doubt, put parentheses around it :rofl: :rofl:

(I hate groovy. But it's better than having to "self." reference every function with Python!)

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7

You can do what I do... @CompileStatic basically everything, strict type everything, and treat Groovy like a bastardized version of Java.