Parse a String to Date in Java

Question

I'm trying to parse a string to a date, this is what I have:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss zZ (zzzz)");
Date date = new Date();
try {
    date = sdf.parse(time);
} catch (ParseException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

the string to parse is this:

Sun Jul 15 2012 12:22:00 GMT+0300 (FLE Daylight Time)

I followed the http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html

Pretty sure I've done everything by the book. But it is giving me ParseException .

java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: 
"Sun Jul 15 2012 12:22:00 GMT+0300 (FLE Daylight Time)"

What am I doing wrong? Patterns I Have tried:

EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz
EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss zZ (zzzz)

Answer 1

You seem to be mixing the patterns for z and Z . If you ignore the (FLE Daylight Time) , since this is the same info as in GMT+0300 , the problem becomes that SimpleDateFormat wants either GMT +0300 or GMT+03:00 . The last variant can be parsed like this:

String time = "Sun Jul 15 2012 12:22:00 GMT+03:00 (FLE Daylight Time)";
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz");
Date date = sdf.parse(time);

[EDIT]
In light of the other posts about their time strings working, this is probably because your time string contains conflicting information or mixed formats.

Answer 2

Try it this way..

System.out.println(new SimpleDateFormat(
                "EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss zZ (zzzz)").format(new Date()));

Output i got:

Thu Jul 12 2012 12:41:35 IST+0530 (India Standard Time)

Answer 3

You can try to print the date format string :

/**
 * @param args
 */
public static void main(String[] args) {
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(
            "EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss zZ (zzzz)");
    Date date = new Date();
    try {
        //
        System.out.println(sdf.format(date));
        date = sdf.parse(time);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

Answer 4

If you have problems with locales, you can either set the default Locale for the whole application

Locale.setDefault(Locale.ENGLISH);

or just use the english locale on your SimpleDateFormat

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss zZ (zzzz)", Locale.ENGLISH);

You can also use Locale.US or Locale.UK .