Question

I have converted some dates to string and stored them in my database using

      DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm:ss");

they look like this: “12-09-2012 02:33:00” when they come out as strings

I am then trying to retrieve them using

      DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm:ss"); 

this gives me a parseexception saying that it’s and unparsable date this is the exception message:

java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: “12-09-2012 02:33:00” (at offset 2)

Here is some code to give a better understanding of what I am doing:

    String start="";
    String slut="";
    DateFormat formatterday = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm:ss");

            start=formatterday.format(formatterday.parse(a.startTime));
            slut=formatterday.format(formatterday.parse(a.endTime));  

I have tried sepparating my statements so that I parse first and then format and the error seems to appear during parse.

Answer 1

Simple date format accepts specific pattern, and your string value “12-09-2012 02:33:00”, clearly doesn’t follow given pattern “hh:mm:ss”. In order to convert original date string to date object you need to use original pattern.

Simple example:

DateFormat formatter1 = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm:ss");
DateFormat formatter2 = new SimpleDateFormat("hh:mm:ss");

String originalDateValue = "12-09-2012 02:33:00";
Date originalDate = formatter1.parse( originalDateValue );

String shortDateValue = formatter2.format( originalDate );
Date shortDate = formatter2.parse( shortDateValue );

System.out.println( originalDateValue );
System.out.println( originalDate );

System.out.println( shortDateValue );
System.out.println( shortDate );

This will print out:

12-09-2012 02:33:00
Wed Sep 12 02:33:00 CEST 2012
02:33:00
Thu Jan 01 02:33:00 CET 1970

Notice that shortDate has value from beginning of era -> 1.1.1970.