Java: unparseable date exception

From Oracle docs, Date.toString() method convert Date object to a String of the specific form - do not use toString method on Date object. Try to use:

String stringDate = new SimpleDateFormat(YOUR_STRING_PATTERN).format(yourDateObject);

Next step is parse stringDate to Date:

Date date = new SimpleDateFormat(OUTPUT_PATTERN).parse(stringDate);

Note that, parse method throws ParseException

What you're basically doing here is relying on Date#toString() which already has a fixed pattern. To convert a Java Date object into another human readable String pattern, you need SimpleDateFormat#format().

private String modifyDateLayout(String inputDate) throws ParseException{
    Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z").parse(inputDate);
    return new SimpleDateFormat("dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss").format(date);
}

By the way, the "unparseable date" exception can here only be thrown by SimpleDateFormat#parse(). This means that the inputDate isn't in the expected pattern "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z". You'll probably need to modify the pattern to match the inputDate's actual pattern.

Update: Okay, I did a test:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    String inputDate = "2010-01-04 01:32:27 UTC";
    String newDate = new Test().modifyDateLayout(inputDate);
    System.out.println(newDate);
}

This correctly prints:

03.01.2010 21:32:27

(I'm on GMT-4)

Update 2: as per your edit, you really got a ParseException on that. The most suspicious part would then be the timezone of UTC. Is this actually known at your Java environment? What Java version and what OS version are you using? Check TimeZone.getAvailableIDs(). There must be a UTC in between.

I encountered this error working in Talend. I was able to store S3 CSV files created from Redshift without a problem. The error occurred when I was trying to load the same S3 CSV files into an Amazon RDS MySQL database. I tried the default timestamp Talend timestamp formats but they were throwing exception:unparseable date when loading into MySQL.

This from the accepted answer helped me solve this problem:

By the way, the "unparseable date" exception can here only be thrown by SimpleDateFormat#parse(). This means that the inputDate isn't in the expected pattern "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z". You'll probably need to modify the pattern to match the inputDate's actual pattern

The key to my solution was changing the Talend schema. Talend set the timestamp field to "date" so I changed it to "timestamp" then I inserted "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z" into the format string column view a screenshot here talend schema

I had other issues with 12 hour and 24 hour timestamp translations until I added the "z" at the end of the timestamp string.