converting string to date and converting date back to string

Question

Hi for some of the requirement i need to convert the string representation of date(with no format) to date object and convert back to string(with a specific format)

This is what i tried so far, the output is not coming as expected and it's printing something like 08140009 - Any idea what is this

And please provide any suggestions.

MY code is :

public String getDateBackToCST(String  createDate){

    SimpleDateFormat dateFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("MMddyyyy");
    TimeZone obj = TimeZone.getTimeZone("CST");
    dateFormatter.setTimeZone(obj);
    Date createdDate = null;

    try {
        createdDate = dateFormatter.parse(createDate);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return dateFormatter.format(createdDate);
}

Answer 1

You need to specific proper flags for SimpleDateFormat. You have 2 options to specify timezone z and Z and to specify day name use E like this

import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;

public class Main {



    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {

        String date = "Sat Sep 20 23:39:04 IST 2014 ";
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd hh:mm:ss z yyyy");
        System.out.println(sdf.parse(date));

    }
}