Question

Is there a date formatting tool for Atom Dates.

According to this link:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4287

   Such date values happen to be compatible with the following
   specifications: [ISO.8601.1988], [W3C.NOTE-datetime-19980827], and
   [W3C.REC-xmlschema-2-20041028].

   Example Date constructs:

   <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02Z</updated>
   <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02.25Z</updated>
   <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02+01:00</updated>
   <updated>2003-12-13T18:30:02.25+01:00</updated>

 

I tried to use Joda ISODateTimeFormat.dateTime(); but it seems it doesn’t handle the parsing when there is no milliseconds (2003-12-13T18:30:02Z for exemple).

What is the simplest way to parse all these date formats?

Answer 1

This is ISO 8601 format, the standard format used in for example XML. Joda Time supports this format very well, you can just pass these strings to the constructor of DateTime:

DateTime timestamp = new DateTime("2003-12-13T18:30:02Z");

Works without any problems, also if there are no milliseconds in the string.