Hello,
we have a web application that always takes the input of time in its UTC format as
2012-12-06T05:00:00.000Z
and here is the code that parse the date into a
java util Date object
private static final
Pattern PATTERN = Pattern.compile(
"(\\d{4})(?:-(\\d{2}))?(?:-(\\d{2}))?(?:[Tt](?:(\\d{2}))?(?::(\\d{2}))?(?::(\\d{2}))?(?:\\.(\\d{3}))?)?([Zz])?(?:([+-])(\\d{2}):(\\d{2}))?");
Matcher m = PATTERN.matcher(dateString);
Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
int hoff = 0, moff = 0, doff = -1;
if (m.group(9) != null) {
doff = m.group(9).equals("-") ? 1 : -1;
hoff = doff * (m.group(10) != null ? Integer.parseInt(m.group(10)) : 0);
moff = doff * (m.group(11) != null ? Integer.parseInt(m.group(11)) : 0);
}
c.set(Calendar.YEAR, Integer.parseInt(m.group(1)));
c.set(Calendar.MONTH, m.group(2) != null ? Integer.parseInt(m.group(2))-1 : 0);
c.set(Calendar.DATE, m.group(3) != null ? Integer.parseInt(m.group(3)) : 1);
c.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, m.group(4) != null ? Integer.parseInt(m.group(4)) + hoff: 0);
c.set(Calendar.MINUTE, m.group(5) != null ? Integer.parseInt(m.group(5)) + moff: 0);
c.set(Calendar.SECOND, m.group(6) != null ? Integer.parseInt(m.group(6)) : 0);
c.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, m.group(7) != null ? Integer.parseInt(m.group(7)) : 0);
return c.getTime();
Recently an odd thing was observed that as the application first starts, the returned date will be just correctly printed as
Thur Dec 06 00:00:00 EST 2012
since we are in EST timezone. Then after a while, after some execution, even without restart the application, the same date would be printed as
Thur Dec 06 05:00:00 UTC 2012
I have been digging down in the application and I don't see any changes that would reset the default timezone of our application. How could that happen? It has been a week since we started working on this and we are still clueless :-(
Also, is there anyway to make sure the application keeps using the system timezone as that would not be changing?
thanks a lot for any help/hints