Optional parts in SimpleDateFormat

Question

I\'m reading in date strings that could be with or without a time zone adjustment: yyyyMMddHHmmssz or yyyyMMddHHmmss. When a string is missing a z

Answer 1

If you can use Joda Datetime it supports optional parts in formatter, for example, "yyyy-MM-dd [hh:mm:ss]"

private DateTimeFormatter fmt = new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
.append(DateTimeFormat.forPattern("yyyy-MM-dd"))                                            
.appendOptional(
    new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
    .appendLiteral(' ')
    .append(DateTimeFormat.forPattern("HH:mm:ss"))
    .toParser()
.toFormatter();