Java 8 - DateTimeFormatter and ISO_INSTANT issues with ZonedDateTime

The ISO_INSTANT formatter is documented here - "This is a special case formatter intended to allow a human readable form of an Instant". As such, this formatter is intended for use with an Instant not a ZonedDateTime.

Formatting

When formatting, ISO_INSTANT can format any temporal object that can provide ChronoField.INSTANT_SECONDS and ChronoField.NANO_OF_SECOND. Both Instant and ZonedDateTime can provide these two fields, thus both work:

// works with Instant
Instant instant = Instant.now();
System.out.println(DateTimeFormatter.ISO_INSTANT.format(instant));

// works with ZonedDateTime 
ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.now();
System.out.println(zdt.format(DateTimeFormatter.ISO_INSTANT));

// example output
2014-09-02T08:05:23.653Z

Parsing

When parsing, ISO_INSTANT will only produce ChronoField.INSTANT_SECONDS and ChronoField.NANO_OF_SECOND. An Instant can be built from those two fields, but ZonedDateTime requires a ZoneId as well:

To parse a ZonedDateTime it is essential that a time-zone ZoneId is present. The time-zone can be (a) parsed from the string, or (b) specified to the formatter (using JDK 8u20):

// option a - parsed from the string
DateTimeFormatter f = DateTimeFormatter.ISO_DATE_TIME;
ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.parse("2014-09-02T08:05:23.653Z", f);

// option b - specified in the formatter - REQUIRES JDK 8u20 !!!
DateTimeFormatter f = DateTimeFormatter.ISO_INSTANT.withZone(ZoneId.systemDefault());
ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.parse("2014-09-02T08:05:23.653Z", f);

See documentation for ISO_ZONED_DATE_TIME, ISO_OFFSET_DATE_TIME and ISO_DATE_TIME (any of these three can be used to parse a ZonedDateTime without specifying withZone()).

Summary

The ISO_INSTANT formatter is a special case formatter designed to work with Instant. If you are using a ZonedDateTime you should use a different formatter, such as ISO_DATE_TIME or ISO_ZONED_DATE_TIME.

I'm not sure, but this might be a bug in Java 8. Maybe it was intended to behave in this way, but I think that the workaround I'm going to propose to you should be the default behavior (when no ZoneId is specified, just take system default):

ZonedDateTime now = ZonedDateTime.now();
DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormatter.ISO_INSTANT
    .withZone(ZoneId.systemDefault());
System.out
    .println(ZonedDateTime.parse(now.format(formatter), formatter));

There's a similar bug which was fixed in OpenJDK: JDK-8033662 - but it's only similar, not exactly the same.