I want to achieve a similar operation in java:
time = "2014-05-19 13:36:05" interval = "60 (seconds)" time - interval = "2014-05-19 13:35:05"
What’s the best approach to express this in Java given the following constraints:
The datetime is a formated string.
The interval is an integer.
The calculated time should be also a datetime formatted string.
Answer
You should work with “Date” objects, which basically represent an instance in time (number of milliseconds since Unix epoch) when doing the subtraction. Once you have a “Date” Object you can use “getTime” method (http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Date.html#getTime()) to get this milliseconds value, and subtract 60 seconds (make sure to work with milliseconds not seconds!), and create a new “Date” with that resulting value.
This is one approach. There are many, Joda library is also quite popular. It has a method to subtract milliseconds from its date representation, http://www.joda.org/joda-time/apidocs/org/joda/time/DateTime.html#minusSeconds(int).