If you really need to transform a date to a LocalDateTime object, you could use the LocalDate.atStartOfDay(). This will give you a LocalDateTime object at the specified date, having the hour, minute and second fields set to 0:

final DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyyMMdd");
LocalDateTime time = LocalDate.parse("20140218", formatter).atStartOfDay();

For what is worth if anyone should read again this topic(like me) the correct answer would be in DateTimeFormatter definition, e.g.:

private static DateTimeFormatter DATE_FORMAT =  
            new DateTimeFormatterBuilder().appendPattern("dd/MM/yyyy[ [HH][:mm][:ss][.SSS]]")
            .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0)
            .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.MINUTE_OF_HOUR, 0)
            .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.SECOND_OF_MINUTE, 0)
            .toFormatter(); 

One should set the optional fields if they will appear. And the rest of code should be exactly the same.

Edit : usefull thing from wittyameta comment :

Remember to add the parseDefaulting AFTER you have called appendPattern. Otherwise it'll give DateTimeParseException

For anyone who landed here with this error, like I did:

Unable to obtain LocalDateTime from TemporalAccessor: {HourOfAmPm=0, MinuteOfHour=0}

It came from a the following line:

LocalDateTime.parse(date, DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("M/d/yy h:mm"));

It turned out that it was because I was using a 12hr Hour pattern on a 0 hour, instead of a 24hr pattern.

Changing the hour to 24hr pattern by using a capital H fixes it:

LocalDateTime.parse(date, DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("M/d/yy H:mm"));

This is a really unclear and unhelpful error message. After much trial and error I found that LocalDateTime will give the above error if you do not attempt to parse a time. By using LocalDate instead, it works without erroring.

This is poorly documented and the related exception is very unhelpful.

Expanding on retrography's answer..: I had this same problem even when using LocalDate and not LocalDateTime. The issue was that I had created my DateTimeFormatter using .withResolverStyle(ResolverStyle.STRICT);, so I had to use date pattern uuuuMMdd instead of yyyyMMdd (i.e. "year" instead of "year-of-era")!

DateTimeFormatter formatter = new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
  .parseStrict()
  .appendPattern("uuuuMMdd")
  .toFormatter()
  .withResolverStyle(ResolverStyle.STRICT);
LocalDate dt = LocalDate.parse("20140218", formatter);

(This solution was originally a comment to retrography's answer, but I was encouraged to post it as a stand-alone answer because it apparently works really well for many people.)

If the date String does not include any value for hours, minutes and etc you cannot directly convert this to a LocalDateTime. You can only convert it to a LocalDate, because the string only represent the year,month and date components it would be the correct thing to do.

DateTimeFormatter dtf = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyyMMdd");
LocalDate ld = LocalDate.parse("20180306", dtf); // 2018-03-06

Anyway you can convert this to LocalDateTime.

DateTimeFormatter dtf = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyyMMdd");
LocalDate ld = LocalDate.parse("20180306", dtf);
LocalDateTime ldt = LocalDateTime.of(ld, LocalTime.of(0,0)); // 2018-03-06T00:00

 DateTimeFormatter format = new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
                            .appendPattern("yyyy-MM-dd")
                            .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0)
                            .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.MINUTE_OF_HOUR, 0)
                            .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.SECOND_OF_MINUTE, 0)
                            .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.MILLI_OF_SECOND, 0)
                            .toFormatter();

Works for me

You do not need to define a DateTimeFormatter

You do not need to define a DateTimeFormatter to parse the given date string. You can use the OOTB (Out-Of-The-Box), DateTimeFormatter.BASIC_ISO_DATE to parse it.

Demo:

import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.time.LocalDateTime;
import java.time.LocalTime;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        LocalDate date = LocalDate.parse("20140218", DateTimeFormatter.BASIC_ISO_DATE);
        System.out.println(date);

        // In case you need an instance of LocalDateTime
        LocalDateTime ldt = date.atTime(LocalTime.MIN);
        System.out.println(ldt);
    }
}

Output:

2014-02-18
2014-02-18T00:00

ONLINE DEMO

Learn more about the modern Date-Time API^* from Trail: Date Time.

^{* If you are working for an Android project and your Android API level is still not compliant with Java-8, check Java 8+ APIs available through desugaring. Note that Android 8.0 Oreo already provides support for java.time. Check this answer and this answer to learn how to use java.time API with JDBC.}

In cases where you simply want to take a format (whether or not it has time) and want to parse to a LocalDateTime, you can do the following.

LocalDateTime parseDateTime(String dateTime, DateTimeFormatter fmt) {
  return fmt.parse(dateTime, t -> {
    LocalDate date = t.query(TemporalQueries.localDate());
    LocalTime time = t.query(TemporalQueries.localTime());
    return LocalDateTime.of(date, time != null ? time : LocalTime.MIDNIGHT);
  });
}

I needed this because I was getting the date/time pattern as a parameter for a custom Spark UDF.

This works fine

public class DateDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm");
        String date = "16-08-2018 12:10";
        LocalDate localDate = LocalDate.parse(date, formatter);
        System.out.println("VALUE="+localDate);

        DateTimeFormatter formatter1 = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm");
        LocalDateTime parse = LocalDateTime.parse(date, formatter1);
        System.out.println("VALUE1="+parse);
    }
}

output:

VALUE=2018-08-16
VALUE1=2018-08-16T12:10

Try this one:

DateTimeFormatter dateTimeFormatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("MM-dd-yyyy"); 
LocalDate fromLocalDate = LocalDate.parse(fromdstrong textate, dateTimeFormatter);

You can add any format you want. That works for me!

I arrived at this problem because my input string didn't have a year in it:

input string: Tuesday, June 8 at 10:00 PM
formatter: DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("EEEE, MMMM d 'at' h:mm a", Locale.US);

I knew the year so I just appended it to get:

input string: Tuesday, June 8 at 6:30 PM 2021
formatter: DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("EEEE, MMMM d 'at' h:mm a uuuu", Locale.US);