PHP DateTime to Java Date

Question

I have a PHP web service sending JSON responses back to my Java client. One of the fields is a DateTime value. However, I'm having problems translating the serialized PHP Date/Time to a Java Date.

For example, here is a date stored in my database:

2011-12-07 15:03:01

Here is how it's encoded in the JSON response:

1323288181

I suspected this would be the milliseconds since the Unix epoch, but when I construct a Java Date with that given value, the date turns out to be the following:

Fri Jan 16 01:34:48 CST 1970

Obviously it's not milliseconds since January 1, 1970 at midnight.

How do I go about doing this?

Answer 1

Looks like that's seconds since the Unix epoch - so just multiply your value by 1000 when passing it to the Date constructor.

Note that Date.toString() will always use the system time zone, but a Date really represents an instant in time, so it doesn't have a time zone.

If you're doing anything significant with dates and times, I'd thoroughly recommend using Joda Time instead of the classes in java.util.