Calculating the Difference Between Two Time Periods in Scala

Scala is a powerful hybrid language that blends object-oriented and functional programming paradigms. It runs on the JVM, making it compatible with Java libraries—including those used for date and time manipulation.

For time-based operations, Scala developers often use Java’s LocalDateTime and Duration classes from the java.time package.

In this sub-article, we’ll create a Scala program to compute the difference between two time points.

This follows the logic from our lead C article but applies idiomatic Scala code using modern libraries.

Scala Program: Calculate the Difference Between Two Time Periods

// DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TWO TIME PERIODS in Scala using java.time

import java.time.LocalDateTime
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter
import java.time.Duration

object W3CW extends App {

  // Step-1 Define formatter and input time strings
  val formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss")
  val startTime = LocalDateTime.parse("2026-02-01 06:30:00", formatter)
  val endTime   = LocalDateTime.parse("2026-02-09 13:05:45", formatter)

  // Step-2 Calculate duration
  val duration = Duration.between(startTime, endTime)
  val totalSeconds = duration.getSeconds

  // Step-3 Extract hours, minutes, and seconds
  val hours = totalSeconds / 3600
  val minutes = (totalSeconds % 3600) / 60
  val seconds = totalSeconds % 60

  // Step-4 Display the result
  println(s"\nTIME DIFFERENCE: $hours HOURS, $minutes MINUTES, $seconds SECONDS")
}

Output

Explanation

• LocalDateTime.parse() is used with a formatter to read string-based date-time.

• Duration.between() computes the time difference.

• The result is formatted into hours, minutes, and seconds.

This solution is particularly useful in back-end services, analytics pipelines, or data transformation tasks written in Scala.

Extra Metric: Time Difference in Milliseconds

For high-precision use cases like log tracing or performance benchmarking, you can get the time difference in milliseconds:

val millis = duration.toMillis

println(s"TOTAL DURATION IN MILLISECONDS: $millis")

Output

This is helpful for applications that require fine-grained time analysis or timing-based validations.