I'm having trouble understanding SimpleDateFormat. What i'm trying to do is read a date from an XML file then eventually use it as an X axis point on a graph. Obviously that means I need to get the time from a object that includes both time and date (for example, my data looks like this: 2011-05-07T14:12:25Z).

phi.lho advised using DateFormat which makes sense. However, I'm having trouble understanding the time zone part. For example, take the initial time data point from my file:

2011-05-07T12:06:19Z

The actual start time was 8:06 AM so clearly no time offset is provided by the device writing this file, thus GMT. So, how do I apply my time zone to the data?

Here's a snippet of code. Up to this point all that's happened is I've created an ArrayList called allTimes that simply contains all of the time/date data from an XML file.

1.   Object temp[] = allTimes.toArray();    //convert allTimes from type ArrayList to type Array (don't know why. just like arrays better.)
     String[] stringArray = Arrays.copyOf(temp, temp.length, String[].class);
     SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'hh:mm:ss'Z'"); //create new date format
     //format.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
    
     for(int i=0; i<stringArray.length; i++){
       // See if we can parse
       try {
           Date current = format.parse(stringArray[i]);
           //println(i + ". " + stringArray[i]);
           //println(current);
           println(i+1 + ". " + current.toString());
       }
       catch(ParseException pe) {
           println("ERROR: Cannot parse \"" + stringArray[i] + "\"");
       }
   

You can see my commented lines where I'm trying to see how different statements (setTimeZone, etc.) change the output. I just can't seem to get anything from it.

Aside from that, feel free to criticize my conversions from ArrayList to Array to a string to whatever else I've done. I don't totally understand all of the type stuff. All I know is that when it doesn't work and the error complains about type, I change the type.

Thanks everyone!