Parse function unable to parse string and throwing error in Java

Question

Not able to parse the following date. Getting parse exception. Please help in finding error :

            String myDate = "2020–03–01 3:15 pm";
            SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm aa",Locale.ENGLISH);
            Date date = sdf.parse(myDate);

Answer 1

The separator character that you have used to separate the year, the month and the day doesn't seem to be correct. I suggest you type the date-time string again instead of copying and pasting it from somewhere. I also recommend you switch from the outdated date-time API to the modern one.

import java.time.LocalDateTime;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatterBuilder;
import java.util.Locale;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String myDate = "2020-03-01 3:15 pm";
        DateTimeFormatter formatter = new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
                                            .parseCaseInsensitive()
                                            .appendPattern("u-M-d h:m a")
                                            .toFormatter(Locale.ENGLISH);
        LocalDateTime ldt = LocalDateTime.parse(myDate, formatter);
        System.out.println(ldt);
    }
}

Output:

2020-03-01T15:15

If you still want to use the legacy date-time API, you can do it as follows:

import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Locale;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
        String myDate = "2020-03-01 3:15 pm";
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd h:mm aa", Locale.ENGLISH);
        Date date = sdf.parse(myDate);
        System.out.println(date);
    }
}

Output:

Sun Mar 01 15:15:00 GMT 2020

Note that I've used a single h to match your date-time string.