NumberFormatException while parsing date with SimpleDateFormat.parse()

Question

Have a function that creates a time-only Date object. (why this is required is a long story which is irrelevant in this context but I need to compare to some stuff in XML wo

Answer 1

While the correct answer is the one by Clockwork-Muse (the cause of the problems is the fact that SimpleDateFormat isn't thread safe) I just wanted to deliver another method of creating a time-only Date object:

public static Date getCurrentTimeOnly() {

    Calendar rightNow = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
    int hour = rightNow.get(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY);
    int minute = rightNow.get(Calendar.MINUTE);
    int second = rightNow.get(Calendar.SECOND);
    int msecond = rightNow.get(Calendar.MILLISECOND);

    long millisSinceMidnight
            = (hour * 60 * 60 * 1000)
            + (minute * 60 * 1000)
            + (second * 1000)
            + (msecond);
    return new Date(millisSinceMidnight);
}

This method is somewhat more formally correct, i.e. it handles leap-seconds. It doesn't assume, like other methods, that all days since epoch has always had 24*60*60*1000 milliseconds in them.

It doesn't however handle the case where the leap second is on the current day.