Converting a String to Date, almost done! [duplicate]

Answer 1

The problem with S is that it will produce three digit milli-seconds but will not parse three digits.

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ");
System.out.println(sdf.parse("2011-06-07T14:08:59.697-0700"));

prints

Tue Jun 07 22:08:59 BST 2011

It appears you need to remove the : in the timezone.

Answer 2

It looks like DateFormat can't find the end of milliseconds and the start of timezone. Regex to the rescue!

This is a work around:

    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.S Z");
    Date date1 = sdf.parse("2011-06-07T14:08:59.697-0700".replaceAll("(?=.{5}$)", " "));

The regex puts a space in and this code executes without error.

Answer 3

Java SimpleDateFormat doesn't support colon in the timezone information. You should use other implementation such as JodaTime.

Example usage:

String dateString = "2011-06-07T14:08:59.697-07:00";
String pattern = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ";
DateTimeFormatter dtf = DateTimeFormat.forPattern(pattern);
DateTime dateTime = dtf.parseDateTime(dateString);
System.out.println(dateTime);

maven pom.xml dependency if needed:

<dependency>
<groupId>joda-time</groupId>
<artifactId>joda-time</artifactId>
<version>1.6.2</version>
</dependency>

Hope it helps.

Answer 4

That looks like the ISO 8601 standard date and time format as it is used in XML. Unfortunately, Java's SimpleDateFormat doesn't support that format properly, because it can't deal with the colon in the timezone.

However, the javax.xml package contains classes that can deal with this format.

String text = "2011-06-07T14:08:59.697-07:00";
XMLGregorianCalendar cal = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(text);

If you need it as a java.util.Calendar then you can call toGregorianCalendar() on it:

Calendar c2 = cal.toGregorianCalendar();

And ofcourse you can get a java.util.Date out of that:

Date date = c2.getTime();

You could also use the popular Joda Time library which natively supports this format (and has a much better API for dealing with dates and times than Java's standard library).