Question

I want to parse a java.util.Date from a String. I tried the following code but got unexpected output:

Date getDate() {
    Date date = null;

    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd");
    try {
        date = sdf.parse("Sat May 11");
    } catch (ParseException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(URLExtractor.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        return null;
    }

    return date;
}

When I run the above code, I got the following output:

Mon May 11 00:00:00 IST 1970

Answer 1

You have not specified a year in your string. The default year is 1970. And in 1970 the 11th of May was a Monday – SimpleDateFormat is simply ignoring the weekday in your string.

From the javadoc of DateFormat:

The date is represented as a Date object or
as the milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT.