Question

Ok, so I have a string, say “Tue May 21 14:32:00 GMT 2012” I want to convert this string to local time in the format May 21, 2012 2:32 pm. I tried SimpleDateFormat(“MM dd, yyyy hh:mm a”).parse(), but it threw an exception. So what should I do?

The exception is “unreported exception java.text.ParseException; must be caught or declared to be thrown.”

in the line Date date = inputFormat.parse(inputText);

The code I ran on TextMate:

public class test{
    public static void main(String arg[]) {
        String inputText = "Tue May 22 14:52:00 GMT 2012";
        SimpleDateFormat inputFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(
            "EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss 'GMT' yyyy", Locale.US);
        inputFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Etc/UTC"));
        SimpleDateFormat out = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd, yyyy h:mm a");
        Date date = inputFormat.parse(inputText);
        String output = out.format(date);
       System.out.println(output);
    }
}

Answer 1

The format string you provided for parsing doesn’t correspond with the text format you’ve actually got. You need to parse first, then format. It looks like you want:

SimpleDateFormat inputFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(
    "EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss 'GMT' yyyy", Locale.US);
inputFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Etc/UTC"));

SimpleDateFormat outputFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd, yyyy h:mm a");
// Adjust locale and zone appropriately

Date date = inputFormat.parse(inputText);
String outputText = outputFormat.format(date);

EDIT: Here’s the same code in the form of a short but complete program, with your sample input:

import java.util.*;
import java.text.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
        String inputText = "Tue May 21 14:32:00 GMT 2012";
        SimpleDateFormat inputFormat = new SimpleDateFormat
            ("EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss 'GMT' yyyy", Locale.US);
        inputFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Etc/UTC"));

        SimpleDateFormat outputFormat =
            new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd, yyyy h:mm a");
        // Adjust locale and zone appropriately
        Date date = inputFormat.parse(inputText);
        String outputText = outputFormat.format(date);
        System.out.println(outputText);
    }
}

Can you compile and run that exact code?