[java] Java: unparseable date exception

While trying to transform the date format I get an exception:unparseable date and don't know how to fix this problem.

I am receiving a string which represents an event date and would like to display this date in different format in GUI.

What I was trying to do is the following:

private String modifyDateLayout(String inputDate){
        try {
            //inputDate = "2010-01-04 01:32:27 UTC";
            Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z").parse(inputDate);
            return new SimpleDateFormat("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss").format(date);
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
            return "15.01.2010";
        }
    }

Anyway the line

String modifiedDateString = originalDate.toString();

is dummy. I would like to get a date string in the following format:

dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss

and the input String example is the following:

2010-01-04 01:32:27 UTC

Does anyone know how to convert the example date (String) above into a String format dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss?

Thank you!

Edit: I fixed the wrong input date format but still it doesn't work. Above is the pasted method and below is the screen image from debugging session.

alt text http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/193/dateproblem.png

#Update I ran

String[] timezones = TimeZone.getAvailableIDs();

and there is UTC String in the array. It's a strange problem.

I did a dirty hack that works:

private String modifyDateLayout(String inputDate){
    try {
        inputDate = inputDate.replace(" UTC", "");
        Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss").parse(inputDate);
        return new SimpleDateFormat("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss").format(date);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return "15.01.2010";
    }
}

But still I would prefer to transform the original input without cutting timezone away.

This code is written for Android phone using JDK 1.6.

From Oracle docs, Date.toString() method convert Date object to a String of the specific form - do not use toString method on Date object. Try to use:

String stringDate = new SimpleDateFormat(YOUR_STRING_PATTERN).format(yourDateObject);

Next step is parse stringDate to Date:

Date date = new SimpleDateFormat(OUTPUT_PATTERN).parse(stringDate);

Note that, parse method throws ParseException

I encountered this error working in Talend. I was able to store S3 CSV files created from Redshift without a problem. The error occurred when I was trying to load the same S3 CSV files into an Amazon RDS MySQL database. I tried the default timestamp Talend timestamp formats but they were throwing exception:unparseable date when loading into MySQL.

This from the accepted answer helped me solve this problem:

By the way, the "unparseable date" exception can here only be thrown by SimpleDateFormat#parse(). This means that the inputDate isn't in the expected pattern "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z". You'll probably need to modify the pattern to match the inputDate's actual pattern

The key to my solution was changing the Talend schema. Talend set the timestamp field to "date" so I changed it to "timestamp" then I inserted "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z" into the format string column view a screenshot here talend schema

I had other issues with 12 hour and 24 hour timestamp translations until I added the "z" at the end of the timestamp string.