Convert Date format from “29/05/2011 00:00:00 ZE8” into “Sat, 28 May 2011”in Java

Question

I am struggling to convert my String "29/05/2011 00:00:00 ZE8" into the following format in "Sat, 28 May 2011" in Java.

This is an abstract of my code. It seems to work but my colleague in Chile gets a date that is 2 years in the future when he runs the code.

SimpleDateFormat df2 = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, dd MMM yyyy");
Date etdDate = df2.parse(OCD_ETD_String);
String OCD_ETD_StringFormatted = dateFormat.format(etdDate);  

Hope someone could shed some light.

Best Regards

Answer 1

You need two different date format strings, one for the "incoming" format and one for the "outgoing" format. Then parse with one and format with the other. Like

SimpleDateFormat in=new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz");
SimpleDateFormat out=new SimpleDateFormat("EEE dd MMM yyyy");
Date somedate=in.parse(dateFormatIn);
String dateFormatOut=out.format(somedate);

In your example you are attempting to parse with the desired output format. This won't work: If it was in that format already, you wouldn't need to do any of this.