Parse date with possible single-digit month/day/hour using java.text.SimpleDateFormat

java parsing datetime talend
ewall picture ewall · Oct 14, 2010 · Viewed 10.2k times · Source

On a project with Talend Open Studio (an Open Source code-generating ETL tool), I am getting errors parsing incoming date strings like "3/14/1967 0:00:00" (note the single-digit month).

Digging into the code, I can see it is using java.text.SimpleDateFormat. So the date pattern string I expect I need to use is "d-M-yyyy H:mm:ss"... but it keeps giving me errors like "Unparseable date: 3/14/1967 0:00:00".

I assume that SimpleDateFormat can deal with the single-or-double digit problem. Do I need a different date pattern? (Sure, I could do pre-processing to tweak the values before Java attempts to read the strings as Dates, but it shouldn't be necessary!)

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Oct 14, 2010

Are you sure you actually need to use d-M-yyyy rather than M/d/yyyy? I can see why it would have a problem with "3/14/1967"... what date did you expect that to be? Note that not only have you got "d" and "M" the wrong way round, but you've also specified "-" instead of "/" as the separator.

Related questions

SimpleDateFormat parsing date with 'Z' literal

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 …

Read More
How to parse dates in multiple formats using SimpleDateFormat

I am trying to parse some dates that are coming out of a document. It would appear users have entered these dates in a similar but not exact format. here are the formats: 9/09 9/2009 09/2009 9/1/2009 9-1-2009 What is the best way …

Read More
java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ" - SimpleDateFormat

I would appreciate any help with finding bug for this exception: java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "2007-09-25T15:40:51.0000000Z" and following code: SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ"); Date date = sdf.parse(timeValue); long mills = date.getTime(); …

Read More