Java SimpleDateFormat for time zone with a colon separator?

JodaTime's DateTimeFormat to rescue:

String dateString = "2010-03-01T00:00:00-08:00";
String pattern = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZ";
DateTimeFormatter dtf = DateTimeFormat.forPattern(pattern);
DateTime dateTime = dtf.parseDateTime(dateString);
System.out.println(dateTime); // 2010-03-01T04:00:00.000-04:00

(time and timezone difference in toString() is just because I'm at GMT-4 and didn't set locale explicitly)

If you want to end up with java.util.Date just use DateTime#toDate():

Date date = dateTime.toDate();

Wait for JDK7 (JSR-310) JSR-310, the referrence implementation is called ThreeTen (hopefully it will make it into Java 8) if you want a better formatter in the standard Java SE API. The current SimpleDateFormat indeed doesn't eat the colon in the timezone notation.

Update: as per the update, you apparently don't need the timezone. This should work with SimpleDateFormat. Just omit it (the Z) in the pattern.

String dateString = "2010-03-01T00:00:00-08:00";
String pattern = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss";
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern);
Date date = sdf.parse(dateString);
System.out.println(date); // Mon Mar 01 00:00:00 BOT 2010

(which is correct as per my timezone)

if you used the java 7, you could have used the following Date Time Pattern. Seems like this pattern is not supported in the Earlier version of java.

String dateTimeString  = "2010-03-01T00:00:00-08:00";
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssXXX");
Date date = df.parse(dateTimeString);

For More information refer to the SimpleDateFormat documentation.