Day and month incorrect when setting next day of date using Calendar

Question

//fetch date and convert to date type
String DateString = Integer.toString(getDay()) + "/" + Integer.toString(getMonth()) + "/" + Integer.toString(getYear());
DateFormat parser = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy"); //current format of date
Date date = (Date) parser.parse(DateString); //convert string to date
//calculate next day
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
cal.setTime(date); //set calendar time to chosen date
cal.add(Calendar.DATE, 1); //add 1 day to calendar date
//set object to next day
parser.format(cal.getTime()); //set format to dd/MM/yyyy
setDay(cal.get(cal.DAY_OF_MONTH));
setMonth(cal.get(cal.MONTH));
setYear(cal.get(cal.YEAR));

I set a date to 23 October 2002. I want to set it to the next day using the above method. It shows 24 September 2002 instead of 24 October 2002. Why is it adding 1 to the day and removing 1 from the month?

Answer 1

The reason is that months are zero based index ie, they start from 0 instead of 1 so January is 0, Feb is 1, march is 2 and .....Decemeber is 11

From the Oracle docs :

A month is represented by an integer from 0 to 11; 0 is January, 1 is February, and so forth; thus 11 is December.

EDIT:-

Trying to give the reason for why months start with zero. The tm structure which is defined in time.h has an integer field tm_mon with the range of 0-11, so I guess this has been taken from the C language. One other reason which might sound wierd but can be reason that since we have names of the month but for days(1,2,3...30,31) we dont have any names