When formatting a date there is multiple diffrent patterns you can use. You can found out more about this by reading the Java docs by Oracle.
If you are looking for just area specifc formatting then this section will be valuable to you.
- In the USA time is formatted like this
MM-dd-yyyy - In China, Japan, Korea, and Iran the date is often formatted like this
yyyy-MM-dd - In most other countries in the world the date is formatted like this
dd-MM-yyyy
Region specific data was gathered from mit.edu
Lets start off by saying that the dashes - don't have anything to do with the actual formatting, and are just added in so it reads nicer.
The MM seen in all of these date formats is capitolized because when dealing with dates in java the lowercase counterpart mm will get minutes.
MM will return the month of the year based on whatever was entered into the date formater. Doing one M will result in just the month appearing while doing MMM will return the written shorthand of the month. MMMM will return the full name of the month.
The dd is the current day of the month based on whatever was entered into the date formater. We use lowercase dd in this situation because the upercase version will result in getting the current day of the year rather than month, throwing off the date.
The yyyy is the current year based on whatever was entered into the date formater. We use lowercase to get the calender year rather than the week year.