Question

I ran into a strange issue. Here is a snippet of code that describes it:

DateTimeZone dtz = DateTimeZone.forOffsetHours(0);

DateTime dt = new DateTime(dtz);

System.out.println(dt);
System.out.println(dt.toDate());

the output is:

2012-02-29T17:24:39.055Z
Wed Feb 29 19:24:39 EET 2012

I’m located UTC+2, but this action is supposed to create a java.util.Date object which is initialized for UTC time. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Date doesn’t know about a time zone at all – it only represents an instant in time (like Joda Time’s Instant type). It’s just a number of milliseconds since the Unix epoch. When you call Date.toString(), it always uses the system local time zone for converting that into a readable text form.

So there’s nothing wrong here – just an expectations failure over either the meaning of java.util.Date or its toString() behaviour, or both.

(As an aside, prefer DateTimeZone.UTC over creating your own.)