Simpledateformat With Timezone Displaying Dates In My Timezone, How Do I Fix This?

Given these two date Strings, I am trying to create a menu that allows you to select from the two dates (these are returned from an API with the users timezone): 2019-12-20T00:00:0

Solution 1:

You can use the modern java.time package instead and specially ZonedDateTime that handles time zones.

Stringstr = "2019-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00";
ZonedDateTime zonedDateTime = ZonedDateTime.parse(str);

And when showing it in the UI use DateTimeFormatter to convert it to a formatted string

DateTimeFormatterformatter= DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME; 

or with some custom format

DateTimeFormatterformatter= DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm");

which will give you for the 2 formats

System.out.println(formatter.format(zonedDateTime));

2019-12-20T00:00-05:00 2019-12-20 00:00

Solution 2:

SimpleDateFormat.getDateInstance(...) will give you an instance in the JVM's default time zone.

Set the time zone to whatever you need it to be.

DateFormatdateFormat= SimpleDateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT);
dateFormat.setTimeZone(/* whatever */);
return dateFormat.format(date);