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I have dates in the format 2008-12-23T00:00:00Z. This look a lot like a ISO 8601 format with a Zulu (UTC) timezone. I though the following code would parse it (using commons-lang) :

String pattern = DateFormatUtils.ISO_DATETIME_TIME_ZONE_FORMAT.getPattern();
Date d = DateUtils.parseDate(dateToParse, new String[] { pattern });

If I take the same pattern (yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZ) but remove the timezone, it works.

Do you know how I can recognize the Zulu timezone ? I have access only to Java 1.4 and Jakarta commons-lang. No Joda Time for me yet ...

JodaStephen
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Guillaume
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2 Answers2

48

I think commons-lang is using java's built-in DateFormat or SimpleDateFormat which throws a ParseException for your date. If all your input strings end with the trailing Z, you could use this:


java.text.DateFormat df = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'");
// explicitly set timezone of input if needed
df.setTimeZone(java.util.TimeZone.getTimeZone("Zulu"));
java.util.Date date = df.parse("2008-12-23T00:00:00Z");
Argelbargel
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4

Looks like a bug in commons-lang's FastDateFormat. Tell them about it, and you should get a fix eventually. Till then you could try to preprocess the dates and replace 'Z' with '+00'

Michael Borgwardt
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  • Ok, I'll try that. I wont be able to upgrade to a new version of the commons-lang before a few years ;-) but it might help somebody else ... – Guillaume Jan 08 '09 at 15:15