Java SimpleDateFormat always returning January for Month

Question

I'm working on taking a date value (createWhen) from Active Directory, and translating it into a Java date, for the purposes of getting a list of accounts created between two dates. Everything is working fine, save for one method: the method where I go from the AD Date to the Java date. The method looks like this:

private Date getParsedDate(String givenString) {     System.out.println("Value from AD is: " + givenString);     Date parsedDate = null;     String formattedString = this.formatDateString(givenString);     System.out.println("Formatted String is: " + formattedString);     SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/DD");     try {         parsedDate = sdf.parse(formattedString);         System.out.println("Final date string is: " + parsedDate.toString());     } catch (ParseException ex) {         ex.printStackTrace();     }     return parsedDate; } 

And, for a single piece of arbitrary data from AD:

Value from AD is: 20050912190509.0Z

Formatted String is: 2005/09/12

Final date string is: Wed Jan 12 00:00:00 EST 2005

Obviously, it's picking up the day and year correctly (and if I choose to include hours/minutes/seconds it includes those correctly as well), but every single date is being placed in January for some reason.

Now, I'm sure that my error is a pretty simple one, but I've rechecked my formatting about ten times, and I'm at the point where I just can't see it any more. Can a second pair of eyes hopefully look over my code and point out where I'm going wrong to get the month so grossly incorrect?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Change the pattern string from "yyyy/MM/DD" to "yyyy/MM/dd"

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd"); 

Answer 2

Make sure you don't use 'mm' instead of 'MM' or 'MMM'. As small m denotes minutes and caps M denotes month.