CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroiddatedate-formatsimpledateformat
dazedviper
dazedviper

Reputation: 1022

java.text.simpledateformat behaving differently in an Android project than in java SE 1.8

I was parsing date strings using Spanish Locale with SimpleDateFormat in an Android project and for some strange reason I was getting ParseException only with dates that had September as a month. Not knowing why this behaviour took place, I decided to create a toy program in Eclipse with a date string that was throwing this exception, in order to reproduce this bug. To my surprise, no exception was thrown and the date was parsed correctly.

So my question is: why does the first block of code (with jdk 1.8_25) does not throw a ParseException, while the second block of code (in an empty Android Studio application, with SDK 21 rev.2 and Build-Tools 21.1.2) throws a ParseException? Can anyone else reproduce this strange behaviour? What am I doing wrong? Shouldn't in both cases the strings be parsed correctly as dates?

Code #1 (jdk 1.8_25):

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Locale;

public class Main {
private static final String THIS_YEAR_TIME_FORMAT = "d 'de' MMM, HH:mm";
private static final DateFormat THIS_YEAR_TIME_FORMATTER = new SimpleDateFormat(THIS_YEAR_TIME_FORMAT,
        new Locale("es", "ES"));

public static void main(String[] args) {
    final String problemStr = "3 de sep, 22:50";
    Date time;
    try {
        time = THIS_YEAR_TIME_FORMATTER.parse(problemStr);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}
}

Code #2 (Android SDK 21 rev.2, Build-Tools 21.1.2):

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Locale;

public class MainActivity extends ActionBarActivity {
private static final String THIS_YEAR_TIME_FORMAT = "d 'de' MMM, HH:mm";
private static final DateFormat THIS_YEAR_TIME_FORMATTER = new SimpleDateFormat(THIS_YEAR_TIME_FORMAT,
        new Locale("es", "ES"));

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

    final String problemStr = "3 de sep, 22:50";
    Date time;
    try {
        time = THIS_YEAR_TIME_FORMATTER.parse(problemStr);
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}
}

Upvotes: 2

Views: 635

Answers (1)

Kai
Kai

Reputation: 15476

Looks like "sept." is the proper Spanish September/septiembre abbreviation according to CLDR, which Android uses. For Java, CLDR support is only added in Java 8 and is not used by default, Java default implementation is not 100% compatible with that of CLDR, guess this is one of the incompatibilities.

Looks like it's a major bug in Android 5.0+...

The code works on Galaxy S3 (Android 4.3) & Android 4.4 emulator, but fails on both Android 5.0 emulator and Nexus 7 (2013) running 5.0.1. Even using a Locale instance returned by Locale.getAvailableLocales() would fail on Android 5.0.x.

Google giveth and Google taketh away, I guess.

Upvotes: 2

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