21.3

java.util.Date

THE PACKAGE JAVA.UTIL

A consecutive sequence of letters is regarded as a word and treated as follows:

A word that matches

AM

, ignoring case, is ignored (but the parse fails if an

hour has not been recognized or is less than

1

 or greater than

12

).

A word that matches

PM

, ignoring case, adds

12

 to the hour (but the parse fails

if an hour has not been recognized or is less than

1

 or greater than

12

).

Any word that matches any prefix of

SUNDAY

,

MONDAY

,

TUESDAY

,

WEDNESDAY

,

THURSDAY

,

FRIDAY

, or

SATURDAY

, ignoring case, is ignored. For example,

sat

,

Friday

,

TUE

, and

Thurs

 are ignored.

Otherwise, any word that matches any prefix of

JANUARY

,

FEBRUARY

,

MARCH

,

APRIL

,

MAY

,

JUNE

,

JULY

,

AUGUST

,

SEPTEMBER

,

OCTOBER

,

NOVEMBER

, or

DECEMBER

, ignoring case, and considering them in the order given here, is

recognized as specifying a month and is converted to a number (

0

 to

11

). For

example,

aug

,

Sept

,

april

, and

NOV

 are recognized as months. So is

Ma

,

which is recognized as

MARCH

, not

MAY

.

Any word that matches

GMT

,

UT

, or

UTC

, ignoring case, is treated as referring to

UTC.

Any word that matches

EST

,

CST

,

MST

, or

PST

, ignoring case, is recognized as

referring to the time zone in North America that is five, six, seven, or eight

hours west of Greenwich, respectively. Any word that matches

EDT

,

CDT

,

MDT

,

or

PDT

, ignoring case, is recognized as referring to the same time zone, respec 

tively, during daylight saving time. (In the future, this method may be

upgraded to recognize other time zone designations.)

Once the entire string

s

 has been scanned, it is converted to a time result in

one of two ways. If a time zone or time zone offset has been recognized, then the

year, month, day of month, hour, minute, and second are interpreted in UTC

( 21.3.30) and then the time zone offset is applied. Otherwise, the year, month,

day of month, hour, minute, and second are interpreted in the local time zone.

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