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.