I have a timestamp that I am trying to put into a Date
object, however when I use Calendar, I am running into a strange problem. I seem to be able to unable to create a Date object with the values I want:
public static void main(String args[]){
Date today = new Date();
int hour = 4, min=0, sec=0, ms=64;
Calendar cal = GregorianCalendar.getInstance();
cal.clear();
cal.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("EDT"));
cal.setTime(today);
cal.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY,hour);
cal.set(Calendar.MINUTE,min);
cal.set(Calendar.SECOND,sec);
cal.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND,ms);
System.out.println("Time is: "+cal.getTime());
}
This produces:
Time is: Mon Jan 13 23:00:00 EST 2014
which is not the result I am looking for.
However, if I comment out the 'setTimeZone' method call, I get the following result:
Time is: Tue Jan 14 04:00:00 EST 2014
This is the result that I am looking for but I am concerned that if I am running on a machine that is not running in the same time zone, I will not get consistent behavior.
The problem here is that Java does not know of the timezone "EDT" (Eastern Daylight Time). As a result, Calendar seems to be setting the timezone to GMT.
The timezone needed here is "America/New_York" or "EST5EDT". When either of these values are used, the correct result is produced.
The list of valid Time Zones can be obtained by calling
TimeZone.getAvailableIDs()
It is unfortunate that no warnings are produced when the requested Time Zone is not found.