Question

I’ve written a method that returns the milisecond value of a string formatted date, and for some reason it’s giving me dates 39000 years in the future. any ideas why?

private long getTimeInMs(String currentStartTimeString) {
        //String newDateString = currentStartTimeString.substring(6,10)+"-"+currentStartTimeString.substring(3, 5)+"-"+currentStartTimeString.substring(0, 2)+ "T" + currentStartTimeString.substring(11);
        String newDateString = currentStartTimeString.substring(0,19);
        SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");

        long timeInMs;
        try {
            timeInMs = df.parse(newDateString).getTime();
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            log.error("Failed to parse current Start Time",e);
            return 0;
        }
        return timeInMs;
    }

If I enter the date string “2009-07-07 10:51:01.15” it returns 1246960261000 which is actually Wed Aug 06 41484 11:16:40 GMT+0100 (GMT Daylight Time)

Okay I think the issue is that it’s giving ms past the Java epoc and I’m evaluating it against the unix epoch…

Answer 1

I’m guessing that you interpreted the returned value from getTime() as if it was a Unix time_t value. It’s not – it’s milliseconds past the Java epoch, not seconds past the Unix epoch.