Java Util date Parse ebay api timestamp

Question

ebay api retruns the timestamp as <Timestamp>2014-11-13T06:31:38.258Z</Timestamp> which has to be parsed to java.util.Date, I could come with the following yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.sssZ but th result of which is the timezone 2014-11-13T02:03:23.023-0500 trying to format in result freemarker with the below line of code

<#assign readddate = 
objectConstructor("java.text.SimpleDateFormat","yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.sssZ")>

results in

[12:41:03 PM] Somasundaram: Caused by: java.text.ParseException: 
Unparseable date: "2014-11-11T05:28:45.000Z"

Answer 1

You should change the time zone specifier part of the pattern to X, which is the ISO-8601 time zone (well, UTC offset) specifier:

objectConstructor("java.text.SimpleDateFormat","yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.sssX")

That will handle Z and treat it as UTC correctly.

Note that this was introduced in Java 7 - if you're using Java 6 or earlier, you'll need a different solution. (Let me know; hopefully this won't be a problem for you.)

Your comment about "the result of which is the time zone 2014-11-13T02:03:23.023-0500" suggests that you may not realize that a java.util.Date doesn't have a time zone. If something is converting it into a UTC-5 time, then it's probably applying the local time zone - if you're formatting a value, or parsing text that doesn't include a UTC offset, you should specify the time zone in the SimpleDateFormat.