Java DateFormat returning incorrect Date

Question

I am trying to parse a date with a SimpleDateFormat and I encountered a strange behavior.

This Example prints "Sun Jan 01 19:00:32 CET 2012" on my machine:

import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Locale;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
        System.out.println(new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd HH:mm:ss YYYY", Locale.ENGLISH).parse("Sep 26 19:00:32 2012"));
    }
}

I would expect to have "Wed Sep 26 19:00:32 CET 2012" returned instead.

Is my DateFormat String incorrect?

Answer 1

The year uses small caps y:

System.out.println(new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd HH:mm:ss yyyy", Locale.ENGLISH).
            parse("Sep 26 19:00:32 2012"));

Large cap Y is "Week year" according to javadoc.

Answer 2

Use yyyy (lowercase) instead of YYYY (uppercase). Y is the Week year; whilst y is the year.

Also note that the Y pattern was only introduced in Java 7, which can explain why you are seeing an error. According to the documentation:

If week year 'Y' is specified and the calendar doesn't support any week years, the calendar year ('y') is used instead. The support of week years can be tested with a call to getCalendar().isWeekDateSupported().

Using Java 7, and with a GregorianCalendar, your code works just fine, as you can see in this demo.

Answer 3

the problem is with date parsing not formatting. Try passing new Date() in the parse, see the result and change format accordingly.