Java - Parsing a Date from a String

Question

I want to parse a java.util.Date from a String. I tried the following code but got unexpected output:

Date getDate() {
    Date date = null;

    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd");
    try {
        date = sdf.parse("Sat May 11");
    } catch (ParseException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(URLExtractor.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        return null;
    }

    return date;
}

When I run the above code, I got the following output:

Mon May 11 00:00:00 IST 1970

Answer 1

You have not specified a year in your string. The default year is 1970. And in 1970 the 11th of May was a Monday - SimpleDateFormat is simply ignoring the weekday in your string.

From the javadoc of DateFormat:

The date is represented as a Date object or as the milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT.

Answer 2

if the year is the problem you can add y for year:

 public Date getDate() {
    Date date = null;

    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd y");
    try {
        date = sdf.parse("May 11 2010");
    } catch (ParseException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(URLExtractor.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        return null;
    }

    return date;
}
 System.out.println(getDate());

Tue May 11 00:00:00 EDT 2010

Edit:

To get the correct day of the week you need to specify the date (with the year). I edited the code above.

Answer 3

Specify a year within the Format to get the correct output.

If you don't specify any year, the default is 1970.