Cannot Parse Date and get Milliseconds

I am trying to parse a String into Date.

I am using

new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd-HH:mm:ss.SSS").parse("20140923-14:32:34.456")

My output is: (Date object)

Tue Sep 23 14:32:34 EDT 2014

I dont understand why I do not get the milliseconds. I need the date along with milliseconds and not just the milliseconds.

Expected Output: (Date object)

Tue Sep 23 14:32:34.456 EDT 2014

thanks

PS: I dont want a string object in the end but a Date.

Jon Skeet
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You're just printing out the result of calling Date.toString() which happens not to include the milliseconds. If you print out the result of calling getTime() on the date, you'll see that it ends in "456", showing that it has parsed the milliseconds.

Also, don't be fooled by the "EDT" part of the output of Date.toString(). It doesn't mean that this is a Date object "in" EDT... a Date doesn't have a time zone at all; it's just a number of milliseconds since the unix epoch.

I'd advise you to explicitly set the time zone of your SimpleDateFormat, however - even if you deliberately set it to the system default time zone. By doing it explicitly, you make it clear to the reader that you meant to use that time zone, rather than just that you failed to think about it. You should take the same approach to the locale, too - in this case I'd probably specify Locale.US, which is usually a good bet for formats which are designed more for machine-parsing than humans.

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