Strange behaviour with GregorianCalendar

Question

I just encountered a strange behaviour with the GregorianCalendar class, and I was wondering if I really was doing something bad.

This only appends when the initiali

Answer 1

It is getting the actual maximums of the current date/time. May has 31 days which is 3 more than 28 February and it will thus shift to 3 March.

You need to call Calendar#clear() after obtaining/creating it:

GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar();
cal.clear();
// ...

This results in:

Sun Feb 28 23:59:59 GMT-04:00 2010

(which is correct as per my timezone)

As said in one of the answers, the java.util.Calendar and Date are epic failures. Consider JodaTime when doing intensive date/time operations.