Twitter date unparseable?

Question

I want to convert the date string in a Twitter response to a Date object, but I always get a ParseException and I cannot see the error!?!

Input string: Thu Dec 23 18

Answer 1

SimpleDateFormat is not thread safe. "EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss ZZZZZ yyyy" was working in our application, but failing in a small percentage of cases. We finally realized that the issue was coming from multiple threads using the same instance of SimpleDateFormat.

Here is one workaround: http://www.codefutures.com/weblog/andygrove/2007/10/simpledateformat-and-thread-safety.html