What is this date format? 2011-08-12T20:17:46.384Z

Question

I have the following date: 2011-08-12T20:17:46.384Z. What format is this? I\'m trying to parse it with Java 1.4 via DateFormat.getDateInstance().parse(

Answer 1

There are other ways to parse it rather than the first answer. To parse it:

(1) If you want to grab information about date and time, you can parse it to a ZonedDatetime(since Java 8) or Date(old) object:

// ZonedDateTime's default format requires a zone ID(like [Australia/Sydney]) in the end.
// Here, we provide a format which can parse the string correctly.
DateTimeFormatter dtf = DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME;
ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.parse("2011-08-12T20:17:46.384Z", dtf);

or

// 'T' is a literal.
// 'X' is ISO Zone Offset[like +01, -08]; For UTC, it is interpreted as 'Z'(Zero) literal.
String pattern = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSX";

// since no built-in format, we provides pattern directly.
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern);

Date myDate = df.parse("2011-08-12T20:17:46.384Z");

(2) If you don't care the date and time and just want to treat the information as a moment in nanoseconds, then you can use Instant:

// The ISO format without zone ID is Instant's default.
// There is no need to pass any format.
Instant ins = Instant.parse("2011-08-12T20:17:46.384Z");