What's the best way to parse an XML dateTime in Java?

Question

What\'s the best way to parse an XML dateTime in Java? Legal dateTime values include 2002-10-10T12:00:00-05:00 AND 2002-10-10T17:00:00Z

Is there a good open source l

Answer 1

http://xmlbeans.apache.org/samples/DateTime.html

There is XmlDateTime class. Just do XMLDateTime.stringToDate(xmlDateTime).

Answer 2

I think you want ISODateTimeFormat.dateTimeNoMillis() from Joda Time. In general I would strongly urge you to stay away from the built-in Date/Calendar classes in Java. Joda Time is much better designed, favours immutability (in particular the formatters are immutable and thread-safe) and is the basis for the new date/time API in Java 7.

Sample code:

import org.joda.time.*;
import org.joda.time.format.*;

class Test
{   
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        parse("2002-10-10T12:00:00-05:00");
        parse("2002-10-10T17:00:00Z");
    }

    private static final DateTimeFormatter XML_DATE_TIME_FORMAT =
        ISODateTimeFormat.dateTimeNoMillis();

    private static final DateTimeFormatter CHECKING_FORMAT =
        ISODateTimeFormat.dateTime().withZone(DateTimeZone.UTC);

    static void parse(String text)
    {
        System.out.println("Parsing: " + text);
        DateTime dt = XML_DATE_TIME_FORMAT.parseDateTime(text);
        System.out.println("Parsed to: " + CHECKING_FORMAT.print(dt));
    }
}

Output:

Parsing: 2002-10-10T12:00:00-05:00
Parsed to: 2002-10-10T17:00:00.000Z
Parsing: 2002-10-10T17:00:00Z
Parsed to: 2002-10-10T17:00:00.000Z

(Note that in the output both end up as the same UTC time. The output formatted uses UTC because we asked it to with the withZone call.)

Answer 3

In XML Beans v2 it would be XmlDateTime.Factory.parse(dateTimeString), but this is awkward because it expects an element with start and end tags like <mytime>2011-10-20T15:07:14.112-07:00</mytime>

An easier approach is to call (new org.apache.xmlbeans.GDate(dateTimeString)).getDate().

Answer 4

See Parse and format dateTime values, although: -It takes "GMT" as the default timezone -It does not complain if there are trailing non-parseable parts -Does not take into account that TimeZone defaults to "GMT" on wrong "GMT+xxxx"

Answer 5

You can also use newXMLGregorianCalendar in javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeFactory, which gives you detailed control, including detecting whether the timezone was specified or not.

Answer 6

There's also javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter#parseDateTime(String xsdDateTime), which comes as part of the JDK.