Conversion of string with AM/PM date-time, from Oracle database

Question

I have the timestamp in form of 03-AUG-12 08.15.00.000000000 PM -05:00 I am unable to get a String representation in form on yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.

Here is my code :

public static void convert() {

    String oldstring = "03-AUG-12 08.15.00.000000000 PM -05:00";
    Date date = null;
    try {
        date = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yy HH.mm.ss.S aa").parse(oldstring);
    }
    catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    String newstring = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss").format(date);
    System.out.println(newstring);
}

Basically it is a timestamp with timezone format from the Oracle database.

Answer 1

You can't use SimpleDateFormat to parse such a string, at least not without some limitations:

• A time zone designator like -05:00 (according to ISO 8601) is not supported until Java 7. With Java 7 you can use the XXX pattern to parse it.

• To parse the month name correctly, you should specify that you require an English locale.

• The pattern for milliseconds (S) parses an unlimited number of digits. If your string contains "08.15.00.100000000", SimpleDateFormat would parse this as 8:15:00 and 100000000ms, adding almost 28 hours to the expected value. If you are sure that the value is always 0, you can ignore this problem.

If you can accept the last issue and use Java 7, you should be using something like this:

new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yy hh.mm.ss.S aa XXX", Locale.ENGLISH)