Question

I have written a func to convert Date String (Thu, 1 Mar 2012 13:57:06 -0600) to Date variable.
I’m relying on SimpleDateFormat for the conversion. The conversion happens, but the resultant Date is “Thu Sep 01 11:00:06 GMT-08:00 2016” which I’m not able to understand. I tried different options for the Format string still invain. Any help appreciated. Thank you.

The options I have tried for the Format String are:
1) E, dd MMM yyyy HH:MM:ss Z
2) EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:MM:ss ZZZZ

private Date Convert_To_Date() {

        Date dt = null;

        String str = "Thu, 1 Mar 2012 13:57:06 -0600";
        SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("E, dd MMM yyyy HH:MM:ss Z");

        try {
            dt = formatter.parse(str);
        }
        catch ( ParseException pe) {
            System.out.println(pe.getMessage());
        }

        //String strDt = dt.toString(); 
        System.out.println(dt);

        return dt;
    }

Answer 1

I think the problem was just that you were using “M” for minutes instead of “m”. This works fine for me:

import java.text.*;
import java.util.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String text = "Thu, 1 Mar 2012 13:57:06 -0600";
        // Note the explicit locale. Let's not leave it as the system default :)
        DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("E, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z", 
                                                    Locale.US);

        Date dt = formatter.parse(text);
        System.out.println(dt);
    }
}

(As noted by sgmorrison, you can use d instead of dd too, and that would be a more accurate description of your format – but dd works for parsing in this case.)