SimpleDateFormat shows wrong local Time

Question

I want to store a string into a databse (SQLite) for an Android App with the current time and date. For that purpose I am using SimpleDateFormat. Unfortunately it does not show the correct time when. I tried two options.

First Option (from SimpleDateFormat with TimeZone)

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Z", Locale.getDefault());
        sdf.format(new Date());

Second option (from Java SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'") gives timezone as IST)

    SimpleDateFormat sdf2 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss'Z'");
    sdf2.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("CEST"));

In both cases the time is just wrong. It is not the local time that my laptop or phone is showing but the output time is 2 hours earlier. How can I change that? I would like to have the current time of Berlin (CEST) that is also shown on my computer. I appreciate every comment.

Answer 1

Use Europe/Berlin instead of CEST and you will get the expected result.

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.TimeZone;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SimpleDateFormat sdf2 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Z");
        sdf2.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Europe/Berlin"));
        System.out.println(sdf2.format(new Date()));
    }
}

Output:

2020-09-27 18:38:04 +0200

A piece of advice:

I recommend you switch from the outdated and error-prone java.util date-time API and SimpleDateFormat to the modern java.time date-time API and the corresponding formatting API (package, java.time.format). Learn more about the modern date-time API from Trail: Date Time. If your Android API level is still not compliant with Java-8, check Java 8+ APIs available through desugaring and How to use ThreeTenABP in Android Project.

Using the modern date-time API:

import java.time.ZoneId;
import java.time.ZonedDateTime;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneId.of("Europe/Berlin"));

        // Default format
        System.out.println(zdt);

        // Some custom format
        System.out.println(zdt.format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("EEEE dd uuuu hh:mm:ss a z")));
    }
}

Output:

2020-09-27T18:42:53.620168+02:00[Europe/Berlin]
Sunday 27 2020 06:42:53 pm CEST

The modern API will alert you whereas legacy API may failover:

import java.time.ZoneId;
import java.time.ZonedDateTime;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneId.of("CEST"));
        // ...
    }
}

Output:

Exception in thread "main" java.time.zone.ZoneRulesException: Unknown time-zone ID: CEST
    at java.base/java.time.zone.ZoneRulesProvider.getProvider(ZoneRulesProvider.java:279)
    at java.base/java.time.zone.ZoneRulesProvider.getRules(ZoneRulesProvider.java:234)
    at java.base/java.time.ZoneRegion.ofId(ZoneRegion.java:120)
    at java.base/java.time.ZoneId.of(ZoneId.java:408)
    at java.base/java.time.ZoneId.of(ZoneId.java:356)
    at Main.main(Main.java:6)

As you can see, you get an exception in this case whereas SimpleDateFormat will give you undesirable result as shown below:

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.TimeZone;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SimpleDateFormat sdf2 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Z");
        sdf2.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("CEST"));
        System.out.println(sdf2.format(new Date()));
    }
}

Output:

2020-09-27 16:47:45 +0000

You might be wondering what this undesirable result refers to. The answer is: when SimpleDateFormat doesn't understand a time-zone, it failovers (defaults) to GMT (same as UTC) i.e. it has ignored CEST and applied GMT in this case (not a good feature IMHO 😊).