I need a java.time parser that can handle any valid W3C ISO 8601 date/time string

Question

There doesn't seem to be a built-in java.time parser that can handle any valid W3C ISO 8601 date/time string.

It should return a ZonedDateTime, with missing fields set to 0 as specified in the W3C spec.

This seems to be such a common use case, im surprised its not part of the standard library, and i imagine its been solved multiple times outside the library. Anyone have solutions?

Answer 1

DateTimeFormatterBuilder#parseDefaulting

The examples in your link, W3C ISO 8601 are OffsetDateTime and not ZonedDateTime. A ZonedDateTime require a timezone ID e.g. Europe/London. Also, JDBC 4.2 supports OffsetDateTime, not ZonedDateTime.

You can use DateTimeFormatterBuilder#parseDefaulting to parse your string into an OffsetDateTime with default values.

Demo:

import java.time.LocalDate;
import java.time.OffsetDateTime;
import java.time.ZoneId;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
import java.time.format.DateTimeFormatterBuilder;
import java.time.temporal.ChronoField;
import java.util.Locale;
import java.util.stream.Stream;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        ZoneId zoneId = ZoneId.systemDefault();
        LocalDate now = LocalDate.now(zoneId);
        
        DateTimeFormatter dtf = new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
                .appendPattern("uuuu[-MM[-dd]]['T'HH[:mm[:ss[.SSSSSSSSS][.SSSSSSSS][.SSSSSSS][.SSSSSS][.SSSSS][.SSSS][.SSS][.SS][.S]]]][XXX]")
                .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.MONTH_OF_YEAR, now.getMonthValue())
                .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.DAY_OF_MONTH, now.getDayOfMonth())
                .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0)
                .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.MINUTE_OF_HOUR, 0)
                .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.SECOND_OF_MINUTE, 0)
                .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.NANO_OF_SECOND, 0)     
                .parseDefaulting(ChronoField.OFFSET_SECONDS, 0)
                .toFormatter(Locale.ENGLISH);
        
        //Test          
        Stream.of(
                    "1997",
                    "1997-07",
                    "1997-07-16",
                    "1997-07-16T19:20+01:00",
                    "1997-07-16T19:20:30+01:00",
                    "1997-07-16T19:20:30.45+01:00"
        ).forEach(s -> System.out.println(OffsetDateTime.parse(s, dtf)));
    }
}

Output:

1997-05-21T00:00Z
1997-07-21T00:00Z
1997-07-16T00:00Z
1997-07-16T19:20+01:00
1997-07-16T19:20:30+01:00
1997-07-16T19:20:30.450+01:00

The Z in the output is the timezone designator for zero-timezone offset. It stands for Zulu and specifies the Etc/UTC timezone (which has the timezone offset of +00:00 hours).

Learn more about java.time, the modern date-time API^* from Trail: Date Time.

---

^{* For any reason, if you have to stick to Java 6 or Java 7, you can use ThreeTen-Backport which backports most of the java.time functionality to Java 6 & 7. If you are working for an Android project and your Android API level is still not compliant with Java-8, check Java 8+ APIs available through desugaring and How to use ThreeTenABP in Android Project.}