Why is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result?

Question

If I run the following program, which parses two date strings referencing times 1 second apart and compares them:

public static void main(String[] args) throw         


        

Answer 1

IMHO the pervasive, implicit localization in Java is its single largest design flaw. It may be intended for user interfaces, but frankly, who really uses Java for user interfaces today except for some IDEs where you can basically ignore localization because programmers aren't exactly the target audience for it. You can fix it (especially on Linux servers) by:

• export LC_ALL=C TZ=UTC
• set your system clock to UTC
• never use localized implementations unless absolutely necessary (ie for display only)

To the Java Community Process members I recommend:

• make localized methods, not the default, but require the user to explicitly request localization.
• use UTF-8/UTC as the FIXED default instead because that's simply the default today. There is no reason to do something else, except if you want to produce threads like this.

I mean, come on, aren't global static variables an anti-OO pattern? Nothing else is those pervasive defaults given by some rudimentary environment variables.......

Answer 2

It's a time zone change on December 31st in Shanghai.

See this page for details of 1927 in Shanghai. Basically at midnight at the end of 1927, the clocks went back 5 minutes and 52 seconds. So "1927-12-31 23:54:08" actually happened twice, and it looks like Java is parsing it as the later possible instant for that local date/time - hence the difference.

Just another episode in the often weird and wonderful world of time zones.

EDIT: Stop press! History changes...

The original question would no longer demonstrate quite the same behaviour, if rebuilt with version 2013a of TZDB. In 2013a, the result would be 358 seconds, with a transition time of 23:54:03 instead of 23:54:08.

I only noticed this because I'm collecting questions like this in Noda Time, in the form of unit tests... The test has now been changed, but it just goes to show - not even historical data is safe.

EDIT: History has changed again...

In TZDB 2014f, the time of the change has moved to 1900-12-31, and it's now a mere 343 second change (so the time between t and t+1 is 344 seconds, if you see what I mean).

EDIT: To answer a question around a transition at 1900... it looks like the Java timezone implementation treats all time zones as simply being in their standard time for any instant before the start of 1900 UTC:

import java.util.TimeZone;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        long startOf1900Utc = -2208988800000L;
        for (String id : TimeZone.getAvailableIDs()) {
            TimeZone zone = TimeZone.getTimeZone(id);
            if (zone.getRawOffset() != zone.getOffset(startOf1900Utc - 1)) {
                System.out.println(id);
            }
        }
    }
}

The code above produces no output on my Windows machine. So any time zone which has any offset other than its standard one at the start of 1900 will count that as a transition. TZDB itself has some data going back earlier than that, and doesn't rely on any idea of a "fixed" standard time (which is what getRawOffset assumes to be a valid concept) so other libraries needn't introduce this artificial transition.

Answer 3

This happens because that's the timezone rules for the year 31st DEC 1927 in Shanghai. If you go to this page and choose "Time zone changes for 1900 - 1924", you'll see that in 1900 the date and time are "UTC +8:05:43 hours all of the period".

So Java is just showing the time configured for that timezone, at that year.

if you change your default timezone to Hong Kong it will show correct results.

TimeZone.setDefault(TimeZone.getTimeZone("Asia/Hong_Kong"));

Note that the timezone changed from CST (China Standard Time, the "3-letter equivalent" to Asia/Shanghai) to HKT (the 3-letter name for Hong Kong's timezone).

But changing time zone is not good solution. So instead use system UTC time whenever possible. It will always give local time after conversion.

Answer 4

When incrementing time you should convert back to UTC and then add or subtract. Use the local time only for display.

This way you will be able to walk through any periods where hours or minutes happen twice.

If you converted to UTC, add each second, and convert to local time for display. You would go through 11:54:08 p.m. LMT - 11:59:59 p.m. LMT and then 11:54:08 p.m. CST - 11:59:59 p.m. CST.