Parse ISO8601 date string to date with UTC Timezone

Question

I am trying to serialize/deserialize a date from/to a JavaScript application.

Server side, I use Java, JodaTime is installed on it. I found out how to serialize to ISO with UTC Time zone, but can't find out how to do the reverse operation.

Here is my code

public static String getIsoDate( Date date )
{
    SimpleDateFormat  dateToIsoDateString = new SimpleDateFormat( ISO_8601_DATE_FORMAT );
    TimeZone tz = TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC");
    dateToIsoDateString.setTimeZone( tz );
    return dateToIsoDateString.format( date );
}

// this will return a date with GMT timezone
public static Date getDateFromIsoDateString( String iso8601date )
{
    DateTimeFormatter jodaParser = ISODateTimeFormat.dateTimeNoMillis();
    return jodaParser.parseDateTime( iso8601date ).toDate();
}

I don't mind using or not Joda, just need a quick and working solution,

Answer 1

If you are using Java 7 or earlier you can refer to this post.

If you are using Java 8 you could do:

    DateTimeFormatter timeFormatter = DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME;
    TemporalAccessor accessor = timeFormatter.parse("2015-10-27T16:22:27.605-07:00");

    Date date = Date.from(Instant.from(accessor));
    System.out.println(date);

Update

As pointed out by @BasilBourque in the comment, TemporalAccessor is java framework level interface, and is not advisable to use in the application code and it is advisable to use concrete classes rather than the interfaces.

This interface is a framework-level interface that should not be widely used in application code. Instead, applications should create and pass around instances of concrete types, such as LocalDate. There are many reasons for this, part of which is that implementations of this interface may be in calendar systems other than ISO. See ChronoLocalDate for a fuller discussion of the issues.

There a few concrete classes available to use, like LocalDate, LocalDateTime, OffsetDateTime, ZonedDateTime and etc..

DateTimeFormatter timeFormatter = DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME;

OffsetDateTime offsetDateTime = OffsetDateTime.parse("2015-10-27T16:22:27.605-07:00", timeFormatter);

Date date = Date.from(Instant.from(offsetDateTime));
System.out.println(date);