Parsing a String with a GMT timezone to Date using SimpleDateFormat

Question

I'm having problem parsing the Date from an input string that is of the following format:

String input = "Fri Jul 15 12:00:00 GMT+300 2011";
String dateFormat  = "EEE MMM d HH:mm:ss z yyyy";
Date date = new SimpleDateFormat(dateFormat).parse(input);

An exception is thrown:

java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "Fri Jul 15 12:00:00 GMT+300 2011"
    at java.text.DateFormat.parse(DateFormat.java:337)

I bet it has got something to do with the GMT string. I think I've tried it with z, zzz, zZ, and zzzZ. Any thoughts? Is the input GMT+300 even a standard, valid input format?

Answer 1

The problem was that GMT+300 isn't valid GMT string according to the Java Timezone specification.

Solution: Manipulating the timezone portion of input string. GMT+300 ==> GMT+3:00