Question

I am trying to write a REST-API with Jersey. From javascript I get a Datestring like:

Tue Oct 16 2012 07:10:55 GMT+0200 (CEST)

(That’s what

new Date().toString()

does, but this is not in my scope.)

This date string can be parsed by implementing an own @ContextResolver. I been googling for about a day and the best SimpleDateFormat I could put together is:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss 'GMT'z '('z')'", Locale.ROOT);

But as you can see the ‘GMT’-part and the brackets are “hard-coded”. Is there any better solution without changing the javascript part?

Answer 1

@kidmenot: Thanks for the link, but that solution requires to handle the javascript-date “manually” on the java side and to change the Javascript-side. So finally we needed to change the javascript-part only. There was

var myDate = new Date():
// ... many LOCs
var myDateString = "" + myDate + "";

scattered all over the js-code. So just changing that to

var myDate = new Date():
// ... many LOCs
var myDateString = myDate;

solved the issue, because later on the was a

JSON.stringify()

just before sending it to the server. That JSON.stringify() calls myDate.toJSON() which returns an ISO-8601 datestring which gets processed by Jersey without the need for any further coding.

So we chose this solution to spare us from future complications.

Edit half a year later:

This parse problem occured often and was finally inevitable because of some js-framework.
The following is our Java-Solution:

public static Date jsDateStringToJavaDate(String jsDateString) throws ParseException{

    String[] arrStrDateParts = jsDateString.split(" ");
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("E MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss", Locale.ENGLISH);
    sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone(arrStrDateParts[5].substring(0,6)+":"+arrStrDateParts[5].substring(6)));
    return sdf.parse(arrStrDateParts[0]+" "+arrStrDateParts[1]+" "+arrStrDateParts[2]+" "+arrStrDateParts[3]+" "+arrStrDateParts[4]);       
}

If you got a better solution, please post it here. Thx