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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T12:09:05+00:00

I am using the code below to parse a String into a date GMT->EDT.

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I am using the code below to parse a String into a date GMT->EDT. I don’t understand the results I am seeing. 

        SimpleDateFormat dformat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd-hh:mm:ss");
        TimeZone gmt = TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT");
        dformat.setTimeZone(gmt);
        Date d = dformat.parse(time);

If time = “20111019-13:00:00”, then d ends up being Wed Oct 19 09:00:00 EDT 2011. However, if time = “20111019-12:59:59”, d somehow ends up being Tue Oct 18 20:59:59 EDT 2011. How can this be?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You meant HH:mm:ss for the time component, not hh:mm:ss. It was using the 12-hour clock, and interpreting 12:59:59 as effectively 00:59:59.

    Note that your parsing does not perform a conversion to a particular time zone – because Date doesn’t know about time zones. You’re only seeing EDT because (I suspect) you’re printing out d.toString(), which always uses the local time zone.

    The Java date/time API is pretty awful – if you possibly can, I’d strongly advise you to move to Joda Time instead, where you would use a DateTime which does have a time zone… and lets you convert between them.

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