Question

I am having a bit of trouble parsing a timestamp string brought back from the server using JSON. I am using the following code to extract the timestamp from a HashMap and display it in the Log:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");
Long time = Long.parseLong(event.get("time"));
final Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
cal.setTimeInMillis(time);
String event_date = sdf.format(cal.getTime());
Log.v("Date", event_date);

But for every timestamp I pass into this method it brings back the date 16th Jan 1970, an example of a timestamp that I am trying to parse is 1336773600 which should correspond to the 11th May 2012. I can’t see what I am doing wrong here but obviously I am. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Unix timestamps are seconds since the epoch.
Java uses milliseconds since the epoch.

Multiply your unix timestamp by 1000 to adjust for this.