CODEWITHSUNDEEP
java
tibtof
tibtof

Reputation: 7957

Parsing Date from String returns wrong time

Running the following code:

String s = "1914-07-20T00:00:00+0200";
SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ");
System.out.println(df.parse( s ));

I get this result:

Sun Jul 19 23:34:52 EET 1914 (notice the date and hour)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 277

Answers (1)

Lee Meador
Lee Meador

Reputation: 12985

It's probably one of those time adjustments that took place to get the sun to be overhead at noon. These took place around that time as the world got smaller and local time zones were being replaced by more universal ones. 25 minutes could well be such an adjustment. You would have to look at the record of time zone adjustments for eastern Europe from then to now.

An alternate way to check this is to put this in a loop and see it it works right in 1924 and 1934 and so forth until now. At some point, if its such an adjustment, it might start working and you could narrow it down to a particular time at which all times after work as expected and all times before don't. Though, to be sure, there could be a sequence of adjustments. 10 minutes here and 7 minutes there that add up the 25 minutes.

Note

This page (http://www.prokerala.com/travel/timezones/EET?mode=history) shows the GMT offset as 1.64444 in 1901 and 2 in 1920. That's 39:52 minutes and seconds.

This page (http://home.tiscali.nl/~t876506/TZworld.html) is about the global tz database and shows a LMT (local mean time) of 1:34:52 for Europe/Athens which is theoretically supposed to be +2:00. I'm not quite sure what that has to do with it but it seems a strange coincidence to be exactly what OP is seeing. (I also found that joda-time uses the LMT offset for any dates prior to the first entry in the "official" timezone data file.

Upvotes: 4

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