Simple Date Formatter

[Rimjhim Ray]

The following piece of code

newValue = formatter.parse(new String("").trim(), new Pa
rsePosition(0));

returns null in java 1.4 but returns unix epoch time in java 1.3. Can any of you confirm if there has been such a major change in implementation of SDF from 1.3 to 1.4? If it has where can I find the documentation?

Cheers
Rimjhim

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

First, note that

new String("").trim()

is the same as

new String("")

which is the same as

""

Second: I don't see anywhere in the Javadocs where it says that "" will be handled specially; it's not a valid date, so I'd expect null to be returned, regardless of JDK version. I think this code was relying on undefined behavior.

[Steve Morrow]

There seems to be a resurgence of "new String("blah")"...

From the API:

public String(String original)

Initializes a newly created String object so that it represents the same sequence of characters as the argument; in other words, the newly created string is a copy of the argument string. Unless an explicit copy of original is needed, use of this constructor is unnecessary since Strings are immutable.