I've been practicing on parsing JSON for android apps using The Guardian's API, and I'm having trouble formatting the date into a better looking format. This is what my adapter looks like so far: public class ArticleAdapter extends ArrayAdapter {
public ArticleAdapter(MainActivity context, ArrayList<Article> article){
super(context,0, article);
}
/**
* Return the formatted date string
*/
private String formatDate(String dateObject) throws ParseException {
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss'Z'");
return formatter.parse(dateObject).toString();
}
@NonNull
@Override
public View getView(int position, @Nullable View convertView, @NonNull ViewGroup parent) {
View listItemView = convertView;
if (listItemView == null) {
listItemView = LayoutInflater.from(getContext()).inflate(R.layout.article_list_item, parent, false);
}
Article currentArticle = getItem(position);
TextView header = (TextView) listItemView.findViewById(R.id.header);
header.setText(currentArticle.getHeader());
//Creates the date view and object and passing it through the function to format properly
TextView date = (TextView) listItemView.findViewById(R.id.date);
Date DateObject = new Date(currentArticle.getDate());
try {
date.setText(formatDate(currentArticle.getDate()));
} catch (ParseException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return listItemView;
}
}
I've tried both using a String as or a Date object as the input to formatDate(), as well as many different formatting techniques -
using an input and output date format using .formatter rather than .parse several other solutions I found from similar questions, can't honestly remember them all.
The app keeps crashing with "IllegalArgumentException
". Through enough trial and error I was able to trace the failure to be certain it's coming from here.
Note: The getDate()
method returns a String
Small example of the JSON being parsed:
[{"id":"technology/2018/jul/05/privacy-policies-facebook-amazon-google-not-gdpr-compliant","type":"article","sectionId":"technology","sectionName":"Technology","webPublicationDate":"2018-07-04T23:01:14Z","webTitle":"Privacy policies of tech giants 'still not GDPR-compliant'","webUrl":"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/05/privacy-policies-facebook-amazon-google-not-gdpr-compliant","apiUrl":"https://content.guardianapis.com/technology/2018/jul/05/privacy-policies-facebook-amazon-google-not-gdpr-compliant","isHosted":false,"pillarId":"pillar/news","pillarName":"News"}
The date I'm using is webPublicationDate
This is the first time I've posted a question so I hope I didn't miss anything in the description. Appreciate any direction because I'm kind of lost atm.
Ok so after some more work I was able to find out what caused the failures:
Date DateObject = new Date(currentArticle.getDate()); //currentArticle.getDate() is a string
As soon as I commented this line out everything worked as expected. I fixed it but I'm still not sure as to why, could anyone explain this to me maybe?
Thanks in advance!