Question

I have some code that looks like "Sat May 12 04:46:05 EDT 2012" that is currently being parsed by the java.util.Date‘s Date(String s) constructor. However, now I am getting a warning in my IDE since it says that it is deprecated and the JavaDoc says:

Deprecated. As of JDK version 1.1, replaced by DateFormat.parse(String s).

I tried using the SimpleDateFormatter but the default formatter is causing an exception, so I want to try using a pattern, but what is the pattern to parse like the String constructor does?

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NB: this is different from other similar questions because it is specifically asking about replacing a deprecated (and popular) constructor, not just asking for help parsing an arbitrary date string.

Answer 1

The pattern is EEE MMM d hh:mm:ss zzz YYYY so you can construct it using new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM d hh:mm:ss zzz YYYY").

So code like

Date d = new Date( “Sat May 12 04:46:05 EDT 2012” );

can be rewritten to:

DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat( "EEE MMM d hh:mm:ss z YYYY" );
Date d = df.parse( "Sat May 12 04:46:05 EDT 2012" );

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edit: from the java.util.Date.parse(String s) JavaDoc it turns out that the method accepts many syntaxes; so there will be no single matching pattern for all invocations you will encounter. May need to fiddle with the given pattern using the documentation from java.text.SimpleDateFormat.