Question

I have a date string:

Thu Feb 20 08:00:00 EET 1992

And using this code to format it:

String datePatternFrom = "EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss ZZZ yyyy";
String datePatternTo = "MMM dd, yyyy";
String prettyDate = "";

try {
    DateFormat fromFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat(datePatternFrom);
    Date date = (Date)fromFormatter.parse(userBirthday.toString());

    DateFormat toFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat(datePatternTo);
    prettyDate = toFormatter.format(date);

} catch (ParseException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Why I’am getting the exception?

java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "Thu Feb 20 08:00:00 EET 1992" (at offset 0)

Answer 1

The problem is with the weekday and month and your locale.
Thu is English, so you have to tell the parser that it should use English weekdays:

DateFormat fromFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat(datePatternFrom, Locale.US);

This will work for your pattern.
If you do not specify a locale, the default will be used, which is not always an English one. 😉