What is the Time format for this "date": "2014 08 20 00:00:00 0500"?

I tried converting this date the following way:

SimpleDateFormat fromFormat  = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss SSSZ");

but I got: 

 java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "2014-09-20 00:00:00 -0500" (at offset 20)
Jon Skeet
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That "-0500" is the offset from UTC, in RFC822 format. You just want Z, without the SSS.

The Android SimpleDateFormat docs have it like this in the table:

  • Symbol: Z
  • Meaning: time zone (RFC 822)
  • Kind: (Time Zone)
  • Example: Z/ZZ/ZZZ:-0800 ZZZZ:GMT-08:00 ZZZZZ:-08:00

I would also personally specify a locale, as a matter of course: this is a machine-readable format rather than a human-oriented format, so I'd usually specify Locale.US:

SimpleDateFormat format  = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Z",
                                                Locale.US);
String text = "2014-08-20 00:00:00 -0500";
System.out.println(format.parse(text));

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