Losing an hour when returning a January 1970 Date from milliseconds

Question

I have the following code that takes a String of milliseconds (will be from an RSS feed so will be a String, the example below is a quick test program) and converts those millis into a Date object.

public static void main(String[] args) {
    String ms = "1302805253";
    SimpleDateFormat dateFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz");
    Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
    calendar.setTimeInMillis(Long.parseLong(ms));

    try {
        String dateFormat = dateFormatter.format(calendar.getTime());
        System.out.println("Date Format = " + dateFormat);

        Date dateParse = dateFormatter.parse(dateFormatter.format(calendar.getTime()));
        System.out.println("Date Parse  = " + dateParse);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        // TODO: handle exception
    }
}


Output:
    Date Format = Fri, 16 Jan 1970 02:53:25 GMT
    Date Parse  = Fri Jan 16 03:53:25 GMT 1970

As you can see, between the formatting of the calendar object and parsing of the resulting String, an hour is being lost. Also, the formatting of the output has changed. Can anyone help me as to why this is happening, and how to get around it? I want the Date object to be the same format as the "Date Format" output.

Answer 1

I believe it's happening because the UK didn't actually use GMT in 1970, and Java has a bug around that... it will format a date in 1970 as if the UK were using GMT, but without actually changing the offset. Simple example:

Date date = new Date(0);
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz");
sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/London"));
System.out.println(sdf.format(date));

Result:

01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMT

Note that it claims it's 1am GMT... which is incorrect. It was 1am in Europe/London time, but Europe/London wasn't observing GMT.

Joda Time gets this right in that it prints out BST - but Joda Time doesn't like parsing values with time zone abbreviations. However, you can get it to use time zone offets instead:

import org.joda.time.*;
import org.joda.time.format.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        DateTime date = new DateTime(0, DateTimeZone.forID("Europe/London"));

        DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormat.forPattern(
            "dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z");

        String text = formatter.print(date); // 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100
        System.out.println(text);

        DateTime parsed = formatter.parseDateTime(text);
        System.out.println(parsed.equals(date)); // true
    }
}

Answer 2

The Answer by Jon Skeet is correct.

java.time

Let’s run the same input through java.time to see the results.

Specify a proper time zone name. Never use the 3-4 letter abbreviation such as BST, EST, or IST as they are not true time zones, not standardized, and not even unique(!). So we use Europe/London.

The Instant class represents a moment on the timeline in UTC with a resolution of nanoseconds.

String input = "1302805253";
long millis = Long.parseLong ( input );
Instant instant = Instant.ofEpochMilli ( millis );

Apply a time zone to produce a ZonedDateTime object.

ZoneId zoneId = ZoneId.of ( "Europe/London" );
ZonedDateTime zdt = instant.atZone ( zoneId );

Dump to console. We see indeed that Europe/London time is an hour ahead of UTC at that moment. So the time-of-day is 02 hours rather than 01 hours. Both represent the same simultaneous moment on the timeline, just viewed through the lenses of two different wall-clock times.

System.out.println ( "input: " + input + " | instant: " + instant + " | zdt: " + zdt );

input: 1302805253 | instant: 1970-01-16T01:53:25.253Z | zdt: 1970-01-16T02:53:25.253+01:00[Europe/London]

Whole seconds

By the way, I suspect your input string represents whole seconds since epoch of 1970 UTC rather than milliseconds. Interpreted that as seconds we get a date in 2011, in the month this Question posted.

String output = Instant.ofEpochSecond ( Long.parseLong ( "1302805253" ) ).atZone ( ZoneId.of ( "Europe/London" ) ).toString ();

2011-04-14T19:20:53+01:00[Europe/London]

About java.time

The java.time framework is built into Java 8 and later. These classes supplant the old troublesome date-time classes such as java.util.Date, .Calendar, & java.text.SimpleDateFormat.

The Joda-Time project, now in maintenance mode, advises migration to java.time.

To learn more, see the Oracle Tutorial. And search Stack Overflow for many examples and explanations.

Much of the java.time functionality is back-ported to Java 6 & 7 in ThreeTen-Backport and further adapted to Android in ThreeTenABP.

The ThreeTen-Extra project extends java.time with additional classes. This project is a proving ground for possible future additions to java.time.