JSON date to Java date

Question

I could not find this anywhere  I fetch some JSON from an API that returns standard JSON dates  You can see the format by running this code in a JavaScript console    gt  new Date   toJSON     2010-10-27T11 58 22 973Z    Well  actually  the API I m working with is not returning the millisecond part  and sometimes it returns a timezone instead of Z  so dates can look like any one of these    2010-10-27T11 58 22Z 2010-10-27T11 58 22 03 00   Parsing these kinds of dates is somewhat cumbersome  Is there any way to parse these kinds of dates  using org json   My current solution is   public static Date parseDateTime String dateString        if  dateString    null  return null      DateFormat fmt   new SimpleDateFormat  yyyy-MM-dd HH mm ssZ        if  dateString contains  T    dateString   dateString replace  T             if  dateString contains  Z    dateString   dateString replace  Z     0000        else         dateString   dateString substring 0  dateString lastIndexOf         dateString substring dateString lastIndexOf      1       try           return fmt parse dateString             catch  ParseException e            Log e Const TAG   Could not parse datetime      dateString           return null            Ugh

User · Answer

If you need to support more than one format you will have to pattern match your input and parse accordingly.

final DateFormat fmt;
if (dateString.endsWith("Z")) {
    fmt = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'");
} else {
    fmt = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ");
}

I'd guess you're dealing with a bug in the API you're using which has quoted the Z timezone date pattern somewhere...

User · Answer

Note that SimpleDateFormat format pattern Z is for RFC 822 time zone and pattern X is for ISO 8601  this standard supports single letter time zone names like Z for Zulu    So new SimpleDateFormat  yyyy-MM-dd T HH mm ss SSSX   produces a format that can parse both  2013-03-11T01 38 18 309Z  and  2013-03-11T01 38 18 309 0000  and will give you the same result   Unfortunately  as far as I can tell  you can t get this format to generate the Z for Zulu version  which is annoying   I actually have more trouble on the JavaScript side to deal with both formats

User · Answer

That DateTime format is actually ISO 8601 DateTime  JSON does not specify any particular format for dates times  If you Google a bit  you will find plenty of implementations to parse it in Java   Here s one  If you are open to using something other than Java s built-in Date Time Calendar classes  I would also suggest Joda Time  They offer  among many things  a ISODateTimeFormat to parse these kinds of strings

[java] JSON date to Java date?

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