How do I pad a timestamp string with 0s?

[Patrick Noah]

I have the following date:
formattedStr = "4-3-2011 23:11:0";

I want it in the format MM-DD-YYYY HH:MM:SS

I tried using formatter but it didn't help:
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss");
try {
Date sampleDate = formatter.parse(formattedStr);
System.out.println(sampleDate);
}
catch(Exception e){
System.out.println(e.getMessage());
}
}
Does anyone know how to do this?

[Campbell Ritchie]

There should be %T tags which print a certain number of characters, eg 04 for April rather than 4. Pass the Date object as an argument to the format String. Details in the documentation for java.util.Formatter.

[Claudiu Chelemen]

Also, the string you've got is not matching the format "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss", thus the incorrect parsing of the date.
Maybe it should be "MM-dd-yyyy HH:mm:ss" or "dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss" ?

Cheers,
Claudiu

[Rob Spoor]

To turn a String representing a date into another String representing the same date but in a different format, you must first use one DateFormat to parse the String into a Date, then use another DateFormat to format that Date back into a String.