I'm parsing a number of news feeds and each item's pubDate follows the same format: Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:18:23 +0000 Unfortunately one feed does not: Sat, 10 Jun 2017 12:49:45 EST I have tried to parse the date with no luck using androids java date and SimpleDateFormat : try { Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(); TimeZone tz = cal.getTimeZone(); SimpleDateFormat readDate = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z"); readDate.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC")); Date date = readDate.parse(rssDateTime); SimpleDateFormat writeDate = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z")