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Asked: 2026-06-11T10:52:22+00:00

I need to communicate with one application that is not implementing the full ISO

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I need to communicate with one application that is not implementing the full ISO 8601 and only accept the format +HH:mm for time zone offset.

Android seems to only generate the format +HHmm (no ‘:’ character in between hours and minutes) with the ‘z’ in SampleDateFormat.

Code example:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ");
String str = String.format(Locale.US, "%s", sdf.format(new Date(0)));

generates: 1970-01-01T00:00+0000

and I would like to generate: 1970-01-01T00:00+00:00

Is there any simple way of producing the desirable output without writing the code to manipulate the string?

Thanks,
Luis

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think the easiest way is to manipulate a string.

    a) SimpleDateFormat doesn’t support what you need.

    b) The method appendNumericTimeZone in SimpleDateFormat class is private. So, you can’t override it.

    2) You can create your own formater (implement java.text.DataFormat). However, it will be way more hassle than string manipulation.

    BTW. Interesting thing which I found while looking into SimpleDateFormat source code. There is some code which generates almost what you need (it adds to the end “GMT+XX:XX”). However, this code will be only called, if you specified “Z” in the format and system can’t find a timezone name for current timezone.

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