Question

I have the following code to convert different string representations of date/datetime into timestamp object:

public class GeneralMethods {

    public static String[] formats = {"dd/mm/yyyy","mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss","E MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzz yyyy"};

/**
 * a method to return timestamp object from string date in the formats 
 * {"dd/mm/yyyy HH:mm:ss","E MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzz yyyy","dd/mm/yyyy"} 
 * @param date: the date to format in string representation
 * @return timestamp object
 */
public static Timestamp timestampFormat(String date)
{
    Date dateObj = new Date(); 
    for(String format: formats)
    {
         try 
         {
             dateObj =  new SimpleDateFormat(format).parse(date);
                        System.out.println(dateObj.toString()); // for tracking

         }catch (ParseException e) 
         {

         }  
    }
    return new Timestamp(dateObj.getTime());

}

   // testing
   public static void main (String args[])
  {
    System.out.println(timestampFormat("05/31/2011 21:37:35"));
  }

}

the output from this code is:

Wed Jan 05 00:31:00 GMT 2011
Mon Jan 31 21:37:35 GMT 2011
2011-01-31 21:37:35.0

as you can see the month in the output is wrong for the input 05/31/2011 21:37:35. how this is happening?

Answer 1

mm is for minutes MM is for months so with your patterns you set minutes and months are set by default to January.

Try changing your patterns to "dd/MM/yyyy", "MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss"