THE PACKAGE JAVA.UTIL

java.util.Date

21.3

21.3.31

public static long parse(String s)

throws IllegalArgumentException

An attempt is made to interpret the string

s

 as a representation of a date and time.

If the attempt is successful, the time indicated is returned represented as the dis 

tance, measured in milliseconds, of that time from the epoch (00:00:00 GMT on

January 1, 1970). If the attempt fails, an

IllegalArgumentException

 is thrown.

The string

s

 is processed from left to right, looking for data of interest.

Any material in

s

 that is within the ASCII parenthesis characters

(

 and

)

 is

ignored. Parentheses may be nested. Otherwise, the only characters permitted

within

s

 are these ASCII characters:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

0123456789,+ :/

and whitespace characters ( 20.5.19).

A consecutive sequence of decimal digits is treated as a decimal number:

If a number is preceded by

+

 or

 and a year has already been recognized, then

the number is a time zone offset. If the number is less than 24, it is an offset

measured in hours. Otherwise, it is regarded as an offset in minutes, expressed

in 24 hour time format without punctuation. A preceding

+

 means an east 

ward offset and a preceding

 means a westward offset. Time zone offsets are

always relative to UTC (Greenwich). Thus, for example,

 5

 occurring in the

string would mean  five hours west of Greenwich  and

+0430

 would mean

 four hours and thirty minutes east of Greenwich.  It is permitted for the

string to specify

GMT

,

UT

, or

UTC

 redundantly for example,

GMT 5

 or

utc+0430

.

If a number is greater than 70, it is regarded as a year number. It must be fol 

lowed by a space, comma, slash, or end of string. If it is greater than 1900,

then 1900 is subtracted from it.

If the number is followed by a colon, it is regarded as an hour, unless an hour

has already been recognized, in which case it is regarded as a minute.

If the number is followed by a slash, it is regarded as a month (it is decreased

by

1

 to produce a number in the range

0

 to

11

), unless a month has already

been recognized, in which case it is regarded as a day of the month.

If the number is followed by whitespace, a comma, a hyphen, or end of string,

then if an hour has been recognized but not a minute, it is regarded as a

minute; otherwise, if a minute has been recognized but not a second, it is

regarded as a second; otherwise, it is regarded as a day of the month.

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