How to display Java Date Time timezone GMT/UTC offset using SimpleDateFormat

When we talk about Time without timezone's it makes no sense, "Time is relative" so it's very important to know either the timezone or the offset of time from GMT/UTC in order to understand which part of the world the time belongs to. If you want to display time as an offset in Java programming you need to make use of the Date object and the DateFormat object, let us see how this can be achieved,

Code Example: Java Date with GMT/UTC Offset using SimpleDateFormat:

public static void main(String[] args) {
        Date myDate = new Date();
        DateFormat dateFormatWithOffset = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm Z");
        System.out.println("Current Time with Offset: " + dateFormatWithOffset.format(myDate));

    }

Output: Current Time with Offset: 26-03-2021 10:00 -0500

As you can see in the above example, we created a Java date object using java.util.Date package, and DateFormat object using java.text.SimpleDateFormat package. Note that Z in the SimpleDateFormat string displays the timezone - the offset in ISO 8601 time zone format. -0500 is the offset of timezone America/Chicago