Question

I am using simple date format in my app in following way in the class:

static SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");

public static myFunction(final String strDate)
{
      Date endDate = null;
 endDate = MyClass.sdf.parse(strDate);
}

I am using FindBugs which is giving the following bug in above code:

“As the JavaDoc states, DateFormats are inherently unsafe for multithreaded use. The detector has found a call to an instance of DateFormat that has been obtained via a static field. This looks suspicous.”

Can someone please explain the bug. I am not able to understand what above message is trying to tell.

Thanks for reading!!

Answer 1

The others who answered about thread-safety and removing the static keyword from before SimpleDateFormat are correct, though the code you posted with your question is not compilable at all.

I think this is closer to the code you’re looking for:

public static Date parseDateStr(final String dateStr) throws ParseException
{
 SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
 return sdf.parse(dateStr);
}