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I am fairly new to Groovy (but already loving it). I am not new to coding but haven't had much experience so far.

What am I doing? I am extracting certain information from an excel file to create a XML (SOAP) message from it to forward it to a web-service. Everything works fine so far except the Date conversion.

I am saving the string date to a var

odate = 'Wed Oct 31 00:00:00 CET 2012'

I need to reformat this Date into something like

"10/31/2012 10:09:00" (MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss)

I have tried to parse the date as mentioned in another question but all I get is an exception. 

String odate = 'Wed Oct 31 00:00:00 CET 2012'
def parsedodate = new Date().parse('E MMM dd H:m:s z yyyy', odate)

println parsedodate.format('MM/dd/yyyy h:m:s')

Exception thrown 31.10.2012 10:18:25 org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.StackTraceUtils sanitize

WARNUNG: Sanitizing stacktrace:

java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "Wed Oct 31 00:00:00 CET 2012"

Now after a little reading and some rounds of trial & error I found out that somehow the parse method seems to only interpret german dates. The following works after manually changing the string date to a german format (which is whre I am located). 

String odate = 'Mi Okt 31 00:00:00 2012' //Mi = Wednesday, Okt = October, removed timezone
def parsedodate  = new Date().parse('E MMM dd H:m:s yyyy', odate) // removed the z
println parsedodate .format('MM/dd/yyyy h:m:s')

However, I need the parser to accept the english date format. What do I do (wrong)?

Community
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Christoph Zabinski
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2 Answers2

1

You will need to use some Java to access Locale aware SimpleDateFormat instance.

SimpleDateFormat englishDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat( englishPattern , Locale.ENGLISH);
SimpleDateFormat germanDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat( germanPattern , Locale.GERMAN);

Date englishDate = englishDateFormat.parse( odate );
Date germanDate = germanDateFormat.parse( odate );

String englishOutput = englishDate .format( englishPattern );
String germanOutput = germanDate .format( germanPattern );
Martin Spamer
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1

Whole groovy solution for your problem would be:

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat
odate="Wed Oct 31 00:00:00 CET 2012"

englishPattern="E MMM dd H:m:s z yyyy"

SimpleDateFormat englishDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat( englishPattern , Locale.ENGLISH);
//SimpleDateFormat germanDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat( germanPattern , Locale.GERMAN);

Date englishDate = englishDateFormat.parse( odate );
//Date germanDate = germanDateFormat.parse( odate );

String englishOutput = englishDate .format( englishPattern );
//String germanOutput = germanDate .format( germanPattern );

englishDate.format("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss")
Booyeoo
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