Home/ Questions/Q 6744093
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-26T12:02:33+00:00

Why: When I give input date string with GMT timezone, SimpleDateFormat parses it and

  • 0

Why: When I give input date string with GMT timezone, SimpleDateFormat parses it and outputs EET timezone?

public static String DATE_FORMAT="dd MMM yyyy hh:mm:ss z";
public static String CURRENT_DATE_STRING ="31 October 2011 11:19:56 GMT";
...
SimpleDateFormat simpleDateFormat =  new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT, Locale.US);
simpleDateFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
System.out.println(simpleDateFormat.parseObject(CURRENT_DATE_STRING));

And the output is:

Mon Oct 31 13:19:56 EET 2011

rather than

Mon Oct 31 13:19:56 GMT 2011

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You’re printing out the result of Date.toString(). A Date doesn’t have any concept of a timezone – it’s just the number of milliseconds since the UTC Unix epoch. Date.toString() always uses the system default time zone.

    Note that you shouldn’t be expecting “Mon Oct 31 13:19:56 GMT 2011” given that you’ve given a time which specifies a GMT hour of 11, not 13.

    If you want to use a specific time zone for printing, you should use another DateFormat for the printing, rather than using Date.toString(). (Date.toString() keeps causing confusion like this; it’s really unfortunate.)

    • 0