Twitter date unparseable?

Your format string works for me, see:

public static Date getTwitterDate(String date) throws ParseException {

  final String TWITTER="EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss ZZZZZ yyyy";
  SimpleDateFormat sf = new SimpleDateFormat(TWITTER);
  sf.setLenient(true);
  return sf.parse(date);
  }

public static void main (String[] args) throws java.lang.Exception
    {
      System.out.println(getTwitterDate("Thu Dec 3 18:26:07 +0000 2010"));          
    }

Output:

Fri Dec 03 18:26:07 GMT 2010

UPDATE

Roland Illig is right: SimpleDateFormat is Locale dependent, so just use an explicit english Locale: SimpleDateFormat sf = new SimpleDateFormat(TWITTER,Locale.ENGLISH);

Maybe you are in a locale where ‘Tue‘ is not a recognized day of week, for example German. Try to use the ‘SimpleDateFormat‘ constructor that accepts a ‘Locale‘ as a parameter, and pass it ‘Locale.ROOT‘.

This works for me ;)

public static Date getTwitterDate(String date) throws ParseException
{
    final String TWITTER = "EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z";
    SimpleDateFormat sf = new SimpleDateFormat(TWITTER, Locale.ENGLISH);
    sf.setLenient(true);
    return sf.parse(date);
}