Question

I’m trying to parse the time stamps written in some xml files. Most to the time time stamps are something like 2009-07-22-07:00 but some times I find them something like 2009-07-22Z or 2009-07-22z. Kindly help me how to interpret these Zs and how to parse them. I thing these z or Z is related to the time zone. Any workarounds to parse them just like the typical time stamps?

Answer 1

To add to fvu’s answer: Java unfortunately does not have any built-in method to parse (or format ISO8601 date and time format, and even more unfortunately it is not (easily) possible to parse ISO8601 dates with java.text.SimpleDateFormat.

The well-known and popular Joda Time library does have good support for ISO8601 dates and times.

Edit: Since Java 5, there are classes in the standard API to parse and format dates and times in the standard format often used in XML documents. To parse a date:

import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.Date;
import javax.xml.datatype.DatatypeFactory;
import javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar;

// ...

String dateString = "..."; // wherever you get this from
XMLGregorianCalendar xcal = DatatypeFactory.newInstance().newXMLGregorianCalendar(dateString);

Calendar cal = xcal.toGregorianCalendar();
Date date = cal.getTime();

Likewise there are methods to format dates into strings.
See the API documentation of those classes for details.