Question

I’m receiving an exception when parsing the following date:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzz yyyy");
    Date parsedDate=null;
    try {
        parsedDate=sdf.parse("Thu Jan 26 15:05:48 COT 2012");
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

Is the pattern incorrect? What would be the correct form to parse the date string?+

Answer 1

The default SimpleDateFormat constructor doesn’t support all Locales.

You would have to specify the Locale:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(
            "EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzz yyyy", Locale.ENGLISH);
Date parsedDate = null;
try {
    parsedDate = sdf.parse("Thu Jan 26 15:05:48 COT 2012");
    System.out.println(parsedDate);
} catch (ParseException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}