SimpleDateFormat: unparseable date exception

Question

After looking after several existing posts, I am still not able to get my SimpleDateFormat parser working. Here is the code:

SimpleDateFormat df = new Simple         


        

Answer 1

Check your input for non-printing characters, like tab (instead of space), etc. Sometimes the reason it can't parse has little to do with the formatting of the numbers and a lot to do with unexpected characters (that you can't always see).

Considering some people have already reported "works for me" (@Thanks Bozho!) I would strongly suspect unprintable characters in your input string. Who knows, you might have a vertical tab embedded in there somewhere!

Answer 2

Here is the solution:

            SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z", Locale.US);
        try {
            volcanoListDate = df.parse(currentValue.replaceAll("\\p{Cntrl}", ""));
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            Log.d("VOLCANO_DEBUG", e.toString());
            Log.d("VOLCANO_DEBUG", currentValue);
        }

The important change is .replaceAll("\\p{Cntrl}", "") which removes control characters from the parsed string. The strange thing is, that I do not see any of those characters with Notepad++ in the xml where the string is from. However, obviously there is something and it is working now.

Thanks for all the help!