Why the NPE using static method of DatatypeConverter?

Question

I have stared at this short code too long, and cannot for the life of me see how it can throw a NullPointerException on line 6. Why the NPE?

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Answer 1

Without the specifics of the environment I cannot be certain this is the case but if you are using JAXB RI then it's possible that you are running into the issue described by this JAXB bug: http://java.net/jira/browse/JAXB-761.

While the bug doesn't specifically address the issue you were having (it is related to the parseDate method), the root cause may be the same. It was detected in version 2.2.1 of JAXB but may have been there beforehand in 2.1.x versions, and JAXB 2.1.1 appears to be the most recent release integrated into 1.6 (integrated in 1.6u14).

The issue states that it was resolved with JAXB 2.2.4, which was integrated into 1.7.

Additional note - a related issue was documented regarding a NPE for parseBoolean when attempting to use with 1.6u31 which may be of interest (though little help, the description is very short): http://java.net/jira/browse/JAXB-902. This suggest this could still be an ongoing issue depending on if you are using RI or another JAXB implementation.