java millis,Java 8 epoch-millis时间戳到格式化日期，如何?

Before Java-8 I got accustomed to always keep anything date/time related as milliseconds since Epoch and only ever deal with human readable dates/times on the way out, i.e. in a UI or a log file, or when parsing user generated input.

I think this is still safe with Java-8, and now I am looking for the most concise way to get a formatted date out of a milliseconds time stamp. I tried

df = Dateformatter.ofPattern("...pattern...");

df.format(Instant.ofEpochMilli(timestamp))

but it bombs out with Unsupported field: YearOfEra in Instant.getLong(...) which I half understand. Now what to use instead of Instant?

LocalDateTime.ofEpoch(Instant, ZoneId) seems wrong, since I don't care to have local time. I just want to see the local time zone when applying the formatter. Internally it should be just the Instant.

The same goes for ZonedDateTime.ofInstant(Instant, ZoneId), I thought to apply the ZoneId only when formatting. But I notice that the DateTimeFormatter does not itself deal anymore with time zones, it seems, so I reckon I need to use one of the above.

Which one is preferred and why? Or should I use yet another way to format an epoch-millis time stamp as a date/time with time zone?

解决方案

An Instant does not contain any information about the time-zone, and unlike in other places, the default time-zone is not automatically used. As such, the formatter cannot figure out what the year is, hence the error message.

Thus, to format the instant, you must add the time-zone. This can be directly added to the formatter using withZone(ZoneId) - there is no need to manually convert to ZonedDateTime *:

ZoneId zone = ZoneId.systemDefault();

DateTimeFormatter df = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("...pattern...").withZone(zone);

df.format(Instant.ofEpochMilli(timestamp))

* regrettably, in early Java 8 versions, the DateTimeformatter.withZone(ZoneId) method did not work, however this has now been fixed, so if the code above doesn't work, upgrade to the latest Java 8 patch release.

Edit: Just to add that Instant is the right class to use when you want to store an instant in time without any other context.