Parsing RFC 2822 date in JAVA

If your application is using another language than English, you may want to force the locale for the date parsing/formatting by using an alternate SimpleDateFormat constructor:

String pattern = "EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z";
SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern, Locale.ENGLISH);

Please keep in mind that the [day-of-week ","] is optional in RFC-2822, hence the suggested examples are not covering all RFC-2822 date formats. Additional, the RFC-822 date type allowed many different time zone notations(obs-zone), which are not covered by the "Z" format specifier.

I guess there is no easy way out, other than looking for "," and "-|+" to determine which pattern to use.

This is quick code that does what you ask (using SimpleDateFormat)

String rfcDate = "Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:29:05 -0800";
String pattern = "EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z";
SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern);
Date javaDate = format.parse(rfcDate);

//Done.

PS. I've not dealt with exceptions and concurrency here (as SimpleDateFormat is not synchronized when parsing date).