[resolved] Get UTC date

[alevy]

Please could someone tell me the easiest way to get the current UTC time in the format yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS. I can't for the life of me figure it out for some reason.

[janhess]

Do you want to convert a time zone to GMT?
From Wikipedia
Time zones are usually defined to differ from UTC by an integer number of hours, although the laws of each jurisdiction would have to be consulted if sub-second accuracy was required. Several jurisdictions have established time zones that differ by an integer number of half-hours or quarter-hours from UT1 or UTC.
The UTC time zone is sometimes denoted by the letter Z?a reference to the equivalent nautical time zone (GMT), which has been denoted by a Z since about 1950.

[alevy]

Yes, I suppose. I want the equivalent of TalendDate.getDate("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS") but where the result is the time in UTC rather than my default timezone i.e. if I call the expression at 11pm in my +10 timezone then the result would be "2012-08-02 13:00:00.000" and needs to factor in local DST when applicable.

[janhess]

Found this on the web. It's a web service for UTC time.
http://www.nanonull.com/TimeService/TimeService.asmx?op=getOffesetUTCTime
There's also a getUTCTime.

[alevy]

Surely there's a way to do it with Java?

[alevy]

I did it like this, which seems to work, including accounting for daylight saving

Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance();
TimeZone tz = c.getTimeZone();
Long ms = c.getTimeInMillis();
Date dt = new Date(ms-tz.getOffset(ms));

Note that c.getTime() always gives local time, even if c is instantiated with a different TimeZone.

[_AnonymousUser · Accepted solution]

For reference, it is easier and better to use TalendDate.formatDateInUTC

TalendDate.formatDateInUTC("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss", TalendDate.getCurrentDate() )

[alevy]

Which was added in v6.0.1.