Freemarker ISO string to datetime with timezone

Question

I need to display the below "String" in the desired format

String str = 1979-01-24T00:00:00.000-08:00
Desired format: Jan 24, 1979 00:00:00 AM PST

Note: The tz in the str could be any tz not limited to PST.
Tried the below but none worked:

• str?datetime.iso - Output is Jan 24, 1979 2:00:00 AM CST - This displays the date time in the format I need but the time is being converted from PST to CST.

• str?string("MMM dd, yyyy hh:mm:ss a zzz") - Error: Expected a method, but this has evaluated to a string

• str?datetime?string("MMM dd, yyyy hh:mm:ss a zzz") - Error: Unparseable date: "1979-01-24T00:00:00.000-08:00"

• <#setting datetime_format="iso"> str?datetime - 1979-01-24T02:00:00-06:00 - The timezone is changed.

Answer 1

The problem here is that FreeMarker parses date/time values to java.util.Date (and its subclasses), which don't store a time zone anymore, as it always stores the value in UTC. So that information is lost after parsing. As of 2.3.30, the only solution I see to do this in Java (with Java 8 ZonedDateTime).

Answer 2

The timezone can be configured by the following setting, as refer to their documentation https://freemarker.apache.org/docs/ref_directive_setting.html

<#setting time_zone ="PST">
<#assign str = "1979-01-24T00:00:00.000-08:00">
${str?datetime.iso}