#5 testDateConversions fails with GMT-14

[Emmanuel Bourg]

Hi,

testDateConversions in TestBeanConverter fails when the system timezone is set to GMT-14 (with dpkg-reconfigure tzdata on Debian/Ubuntu systems).

Here is the error:

Tests run: 28, Failures: 0, Errors: 1, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.03 sec <<< FAILURE! - in net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.TestBeanConverter
testDateConversions(net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.TestBeanConverter) Time elapsed: 0.007 sec <<< ERROR!
net.sf.practicalxml.converter.ConversionException: unable to parse: Thu Aug 29 13:12:27 GMT+14:00 2013
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.Xml2BeanConverter.parseDateDefault(Xml2BeanConverter.java:536)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.Xml2BeanConverter.tryConvertAsDate(Xml2BeanConverter.java:304)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.Xml2BeanConverter.convertWithoutCast(Xml2BeanConverter.java:156)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.Xml2BeanConverter.convertChildren(Xml2BeanConverter.java:480)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.Xml2BeanConverter.tryConvertAsBean(Xml2BeanConverter.java:350)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.Xml2BeanConverter.convertWithoutCast(Xml2BeanConverter.java:160)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.Xml2BeanConverter.convert(Xml2BeanConverter.java:109)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.BeanConverter.convertToJava(BeanConverter.java:114)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.BeanConverter.convertToJava(BeanConverter.java:96)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.TestBeanConverter.testDateConversions(TestBeanConverter.java:488)
Caused by: java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "Thu Aug 29 13:12:27 GMT+14:00 2013"
at java.text.DateFormat.parse(DateFormat.java:366)
at net.sf.practicalxml.converter.bean.Xml2BeanConverter.parseDateDefault(Xml2BeanConverter.java:531)
... 31 more

[Keith D Gregory]

I will take a look at this in the next few days. I'm surprised by the output: it appears to be a standard toString(), whereas I believe it should be ISO 8601 format.

[Keith D Gregory]

I was unable to reproduce this.

I started by simply trying to parse the specified date on my development machine and was successful, using the following program:

public static void main(String[] argv) throws Exception
{
    System.out.println("running on" + System.getProperty("java.version"));

    Date now = new Date();        
    SimpleDateFormat fmt = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzz yyyy");
    String str = fmt.format(now);
    System.out.println(str);
    System.out.println(fmt.parse(str));
}

Then I spun up an EC2 instance (AMI: ubuntu-trusty-14.04-amd64-server-20150325), and ran dpkg-reconfigure tzdata to set the timezone to GMT-14. Running the test program (which printed and parsed the current date) I got the following output:

Mon Dec 21 13:19:45 GMT+14:00 2015

It seems strange that I set the timezone to GMT-14 but the output was GMT+14 (when, if anything, I would have expected GMT+10). But the program successfully formatted and parsed the date.

I then built practicalxml using the following JDK installs:

• jdk1.6.0_45
• jdk1.7.0_79
• jdk1.8.0_31
• openjdk-7-jdk (1.7.0_91, installed via apt-get)

Unless you can provide a specific Java and/or Ubuntu version that causes this this to fail, I have to close the issue.

[Emmanuel Bourg]

I managed to reproduce this test failure with:

• practicalxml trunk (revision 305)
• Debian 8 "Jessie"
• openjdk-7-jdk or openjdk-8-jdk
• dpkg-reconfigure tzdata -> GMT-14
• dpkg-reconfigure locales -> fr_FR.UTF-8
• logout and log back in

[Keith D Gregory]

It was actually the French locale setting that did it.

Date.toString() formats strings using en_US always, where DateFormat.parse() attempts to match locale-specific day and month names. Decimal conversions are also affected, as the decimal point is replaced by a comma.

I think that the appropriate solution is to explicitly set the locale on these formats. For decimals it's easy, because that's required by the spec. For dates it's a little less obvious, however the goal is to handle default formatting, and that's what the JDK (currently) does.

[Keith D Gregory]

Updates made, and released as 1.1.19.

Tested with:

• Maven 2.2, Oracle JDK 1.6
• Maven 3.3, Oracle JDK 1.7 and 1.8
• Maven 3.3, OpenJDK 1.7