Question

I have the following string in Java:

2011-12-21T20:27:32-08:00

Can any one tell me how do I store this string by converting it to date?

I need to store it in a MySQL column declared as TimeStamp.

I’ve tried the following but it does not work:

Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssz").parse("2011-12-21T20:27:32-08:00");

It gives below error:

Exception in thread "main" java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "2011-12-21T20:27:32-08:00" –

Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

According to the documentation, z expects timezone indicators in a different format than the one in your string, but you can use X instead, which supports them. So (change is at the end of the format string):

Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssX").parse("2011-12-21T20:27:32-08:00");

From the docs:

Letter  Date or Time Component   Presentation         Examples
------  -----------------------  -------------------  -------------------------------------
z       Time zone                General time zone    Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z       Time zone                RFC 822 time zone    -0800
X       Time zone                ISO 8601 time zone   -08; -0800; -08:00

---

Daniel Kaplan points out in the comments that X seems to be new. You might need to pre-process the string a bit to remove the colon and use Z (capital, not z; the second in the list above) instead, depending on your environment.