Unparseable date Exception

Question

Well, i'm trying to catch date from rss, and i get this execption in logcat:

E/AndroidNews(  870): Caused by: java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "Su
n, 02 Oct 2011 14:00:00 +0100"
E/AndroidNews(  870):   at java.text.DateFormat.parse(DateFormat.java:626)
E/AndroidNews(  870):   at com.warriorpoint.androidxmlsimple.Message.setDate(Mes
sage.java:57)

My formatter is

static SimpleDateFormat FORMATTER = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm");´

My method setDate();

public void setDate(String date) {
    this.date=null;

    // pad the date if necessary
    while (!date.endsWith("00")){
        date += "0";
    }
    try {
        this.date = FORMATTER.parse(date.trim());
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
}

Answer 1

You're using the wrong format, for "Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:00:00 +0100" try this instead:

new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z", Locale.US)

This also forces the locale to (American) English, so the day and month names aren't affected by the device's locale, e.g. expecting "Dom" for "Sun" and "Oct" for "Out" in a Portuguese locale (I peeked at your profile).

The format you have in your question would only be able to parse dates like "2011-10-02 14:00".

Also, don't pad the date, let your formatter do the parsing.

---

If you want to output/display a java.util.Date in a certain way, just create a new SimpleDateFormat (let's call it displayFmt) with the desired formatting string and call format() on it:

String formattedDate = new SimpleDateFormat("dd MM yyyy H").format(date);

This will give you something like "02 10 2011 17" for today, formatted in the user's/device's preferred locale.

Please note that in your comment, you said dd mm yyyy h (lower case m and h) which would give you "dayOfMonth minutes year hours12" -- I think that's not what you want, so I changed it to an upper case M and upper case H to give you "dayOfMonth month year hours24".