This is the first in a new series of posts I’m going to regularly publish (weekly-ish) of code snippets which could save you a lot of #AndroidDev time. The first of which is about one of my favourite classes in Android: DateUtils.
It’s Javadoc keeps things nice and short:
This class contains various date-related utilities for creating text for things like elapsed time and date ranges, strings for days of the week and months, and AM/PM text etc.
It contains a lot of static methods to help you format date, times, time deltas into a human-readable String. The best bit though is that it handles all of the localisation for you!
Example Use#
So I’ll give you an example of where you might use this class. Say you have a Twitter timeline and want to display how long ago a tweet was sent. You could write the code yourself, but you’d quickly end up with a long method which is difficult to test. So instead, use DateUtils.getRelativeTimeSpanString(...). At the time of writing there five versions of the method, but the one I tend to use is:
CharSequence getRelativeTimeSpanString (long time, long now, long minResolution)
So how do you use the method? Well it’s pretty simple:
time– The time of the Tweet (epoch format).now– System.currentTimeMillis()minResolution– This depends how accurate you granular you want the String to be. I tend to use SECOND_IN_MILLIS so the smallest unit of time will be seconds.
Which returns something like this (in English):
2 seconds ago
Or this in German:
Vor 33 Sekunden
Bottom Line#
If you’re doing any kind of date or time formatting, make sure you check to see if it is already implemented in DateUtils. It will save you a lot of time!