Format ZonedDateTime to String
Last updated: October 8, 2025
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1. Overview
In this quick tutorial, we’ll see how to convert a ZonedDateTime to a String.
We’ll also look at how to parse a ZonedDateTime from a String.
2. Creating a ZonedDateTime
First, we’ll start with a ZonedDateTime with a time zone of UTC. There are several ways we can accomplish this.
We can specify the year, month, day, etc:
ZonedDateTime zonedDateTimeOf = ZonedDateTime.of(2018, 01, 01, 0, 0, 0, 0, ZoneId.of("UTC"));We can also create a ZonedDateTime from the current date and time:
ZonedDateTime zonedDateTimeNow = ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneId.of("UTC"));Or, we can create a ZonedDateTime from an existing LocalDateTime:
LocalDateTime localDateTime = LocalDateTime.now();
ZonedDateTime zonedDateTime = ZonedDateTime.of(localDateTime, ZoneId.of("UTC"));3. ZonedDateTime to String
Now, let’s convert our ZonedDateTime to a String. For this, we’ll use the DateTimeFormatter class.
There are a few special formatters that we can use to display time zone data. The full list of formatters can be found here, but we’ll look at a few of the more common ones.
If we want to display the time zone offset, we can use the formatter “Z” or “X”:
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("MM/dd/yyyy - HH:mm:ss Z");
String formattedString = zonedDateTime.format(formatter);This would give us a result like this:
02/01/2018 - 13:45:30 +0000To include the time zone name, we can use a lowercase “z”:
DateTimeFormatter formatter2 = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("MM/dd/yyyy - HH:mm:ss z");
String formattedString2 = zonedDateTime.format(formatter2);The output of this would be:
02/01/2018 - 13:45:30 UTC4. String to ZonedDateTime
This process can also work in reverse. We can take a string and convert it back into a ZonedDateTime.
One option to do this is by using the static parse() method of the ZonedDateTime class:
ZonedDateTime zonedDateTime = ZonedDateTime.parse("2011-12-03T10:15:30+01:00");This method uses the ISO_ZONED_DATE_TIME formatter. There’s also an overloaded version of the method that takes a DateTimeFormatter parameter. However, the String has to contain a zone identifier or we’ll get an exception:
assertThrows(DateTimeParseException.class, () ->
ZonedDateTime.parse("2011-12-03T10:15:30", DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME));A second option to obtain a ZonedDateTime from a String involves 2 steps: converting the String to a LocalDateTime, then this object to a ZonedDateTime:
ZoneId timeZone = ZoneId.systemDefault();
ZonedDateTime zonedDateTime = LocalDateTime.parse("2011-12-03T10:15:30",
DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME).atZone(timeZone);
log.info(zonedDateTime.format(DateTimeFormatter.ISO_ZONED_DATE_TIME));This indirect method simply combines the date-time with a zone id:
INFO: 2011-12-03T10:15:30+02:00[Europe/Athens]To learn more about parsing String to dates, check out our more in-depth date parsing article.
5. Conclusion
In this article, we’ve seen how to create a ZonedDateTime, and how to format it as a String.
We’ve also taken a quick look at how to parse a date time string and convert into a ZonedDateTime.
