What Is The Time Format For This "date": "2014-08-20 00:00:00 -0500"?

I tried converting this date the following way: SimpleDateFormat fromFormat = new SimpleDateFormat('yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss SSSZ'); but I got: java.text.ParseException: Unparseable

Solution 1:

That "-0500" is the offset from UTC, in RFC822 format. You just want Z, without the SSS.

The Android SimpleDateFormat docs have it like this in the table:

• Symbol: Z
• Meaning: time zone (RFC 822)
• Kind: (Time Zone)
• Example: Z/ZZ/ZZZ:-0800 ZZZZ:GMT-08:00 ZZZZZ:-08:00

I would also personally specify a locale, as a matter of course: this is a machine-readable format rather than a human-oriented format, so I'd usually specify Locale.US:

SimpleDateFormat format  = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Z",
                                                Locale.US);
Stringtext = "2014-08-20 00:00:00 -0500";
System.out.println(format.parse(text));

Solution 2:

The answer by Jon Skeet is correct.

Standard Date-Time Format

Here is some example code showing how to transform your string into compliance with ISO 8601.

String inputRaw = "2014-08-20 00:00:00 -0500";
String input = inputRaw.replaceFirst( " ", "T" ).replaceFirst( " ", "" ); // Replace first SPACE with a 'T', and delete second SPACE.// input is "2014-08-20T00:00:00-0500".

Joda-Time

You can pass that compliant string directly to the constructor of DateTime in Joda-Time. Ditto for the equivalent in the java.time package in Java 8 (inspired by Joda-Time).

DateTimeZonetimeZone= DateTimeZone.forID( "America/Montreal" ); // Specify it rather than have JVM's default applied.DateTimedateTimeMontréal=newDateTime( input, timeZone );
DateTimedateTimeUtc= dateTimeMontréal.withZone( DateTimeZone.UTC );

Dump to console.

System.out.println( "inputRaw: " + inputRaw );
System.out.println( "input: " + input );
System.out.println( "dateTimeMontréal: " + dateTimeMontréal );
System.out.println( "dateTimeUtc: " + dateTimeUtc );

When run…

inputRaw: 2014-08-20 00:00:00 -0500
input: 2014-08-20T00:00:00-0500
dateTimeMontréal: 2014-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00
dateTimeUtc: 2014-08-20T05:00:00.000Z