SimpleDateFormat parsing date with 'Z' literal

Question

I am trying to parse a date that looks like this:

2010-04-05T17:16:00Z

This is a valid date per http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3339.txt. The 'Z' literal (quote) "imply that UTC is the preferred reference point for the specified time."

If I try to parse it using SimpleDateFormat and this pattern:

yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss

it will be parsed as a Mon Apr 05 17:16:00 EDT 2010

SimpleDateFormat is unable to parse the string with these patterns:

yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssz
yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ

I can explicitly set the TimeZone to use on the SimpleDateFormat to get the expected output, but I don't think that should be necessary. Is there something I am missing? Is there an alternative date parser?

Answer 1

Java doesn't parse ISO dates correctly.

Similar to McKenzie's answer.

Just fix the Z before parsing.

Code

String string = "2013-03-05T18:05:05.000Z";
String defaultTimezone = TimeZone.getDefault().getID();
Date date = (new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ")).parse(string.replaceAll("Z$", "+0000"));

System.out.println("string: " + string);
System.out.println("defaultTimezone: " + defaultTimezone);
System.out.println("date: " + (new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ")).format(date));

Result

string: 2013-03-05T18:05:05.000Z
defaultTimezone: America/New_York
date: 2013-03-05T13:05:05.000-0500