Question

I’m writing an app which is trying (and failing) to parse a date in the following format: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 04:14:43 -0700

The code I’m using to try and parse it is as follows:

Calendar pubDate = Calendar.getInstance();
pubDate.setTime(new SimpleDateFormat().parse(dateString));

The exception I’m getting is:

 java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 04:14:43 -0700

I have absolutely no control over the date data or it’s format. Any ideas what I’m missing here?

Answer 1

If the date’s always going to be in that format, you could try passing a pattern to SimpleDateFormat rather than using the default constructer:

pubDate.setTime(new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z").parse(dateString));