String-Date conversion with nanoseconds

Question

I\'ve been struggling for a while with this piece of code for an Android app and I can\'t get the hang of it. I\'ve read and tried every solution I found on stackoverflow an

Answer 1

This is what you need (but it will loose millisecond information):

"dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.'000000'"

If you used "dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSSSSS", then would get three leading zeros for your milliseconds.

If you used "dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSS'000'", then you could format a date, but not parse any date.

Try it out:

public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
    printDate("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSS");//02.05.2010 21:45:58.073
    printDate("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSSSSS");//02.05.2010 21:45:58.000073
    printDate("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSS'000'");//02.05.2010 21:45:58.073000
    printDate("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.'000000'");//02.05.2010 21:45:58.000000

    tryToParseDate("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSS");//good
    tryToParseDate("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSSSSS");//good
    tryToParseDate("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSS'000'");//bad
    tryToParseDate("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss.'000000'");//good
}

private static void printDate(String formatString) {
    Date now = new Date();
    SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat(formatString);
    String formattedDate = format.format(now);

    // print that date
    System.out.println(formattedDate);
}

private static void tryToParseDate(String formatString) {
    Date now = new Date();
    SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat(formatString);
    String formattedDate = format.format(now);

    // try to parse it again
    try {
        format.parse(formattedDate);
        System.out.println("good");
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        System.out.println("bad");
    }
}