Joda DateTime: Parse date with “CEST” in string

Question

I want to parse a DateTime using the joda library (in scala, but should be the same with java).

The source looks like

val dateParser = DateTimeFormat         


        

Answer 1

The issue is because CEST is a short zone name that is not unique. See the detailed discussion from DateTimeFormatter Bug parsing with general time zones in US Locale?

You can use the latest version from github that should contain a fix, see this commit.

You should be able to use DateTimeFormatterBuilder#appendTimeZoneShortName to add CEST as an alias for "America/Chicago" or to how you would like to interpret CEST.

Answer 2

Apply parsing with a java.util.Dateinstance allows you to apply a workaround since CEST is not well parsing since not unique:

DateFormat dateParser = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z");
DateTime dateTime = new DateTime(dateParser.parse("2012-08-28 15:35:00 CEST"));
//Here parsed `java.util.Date` instance is back to an instance of org.jodatime.DateTime`

Benefit of this workaround: to not bother with "which version works with this timezone???"