Module java.base
Package java.time

Class Period

java.lang.Object
java.time.Period
All Implemented Interfaces:
Serializable, ChronoPeriod, TemporalAmount

public final class Period extends Object implements ChronoPeriod, Serializable
A date-based amount of time in the ISO-8601 calendar system, such as '2 years, 3 months and 4 days'.

This class models a quantity or amount of time in terms of years, months and days. See Duration for the time-based equivalent to this class.

Durations and periods differ in their treatment of daylight savings time when added to ZonedDateTime. A Duration will add an exact number of seconds, thus a duration of one day is always exactly 24 hours. By contrast, a Period will add a conceptual day, trying to maintain the local time.

For example, consider adding a period of one day and a duration of one day to 18:00 on the evening before a daylight savings gap. The Period will add the conceptual day and result in a ZonedDateTime at 18:00 the following day. By contrast, the Duration will add exactly 24 hours, resulting in a ZonedDateTime at 19:00 the following day (assuming a one hour DST gap).

The supported units of a period are YEARS, MONTHS and DAYS. All three fields are always present, but may be set to zero.

The ISO-8601 calendar system is the modern civil calendar system used today in most of the world. It is equivalent to the proleptic Gregorian calendar system, in which today's rules for leap years are applied for all time.

The period is modeled as a directed amount of time, meaning that individual parts of the period may be negative.

This is a value-based class; programmers should treat instances that are equal as interchangeable and should not use instances for synchronization, or unpredictable behavior may occur. For example, in a future release, synchronization may fail. The equals method should be used for comparisons.

Implementation Requirements:
This class is immutable and thread-safe.
Since:
1.8
See Also: