Java: unparseable date exception

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What you’re basically doing here is relying on Date#toString() which already has a fixed pattern. To convert a Java Date object into another human readable String pattern, you need SimpleDateFormat#format().

private String modifyDateLayout(String inputDate) throws ParseException{
    Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z").parse(inputDate);
    return new SimpleDateFormat("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss").format(date);
}

By the way, the “unparseable date” exception can here only be thrown by SimpleDateFormat#parse(). This means that the inputDate isn’t in the expected pattern "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z". You’ll probably need to modify the pattern to match the inputDate‘s actual pattern.

Update: Okay, I did a test:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    String inputDate = "2010-01-04 01:32:27 UTC";
    String newDate = new Test().modifyDateLayout(inputDate);
    System.out.println(newDate);
}

This correctly prints:

03.01.2010 21:32:27

(I’m on GMT-4)

Update 2: as per your edit, you really got a ParseException on that. The most suspicious part would then be the timezone of UTC. Is this actually known at your Java environment? What Java version and what OS version are you using? Check TimeZone.getAvailableIDs(). There must be a UTC in between.

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