DevGex Search

This article delves into the internal mechanisms of the Gson library when parsing JSON date strings, focusing on the impact of millisecond sections and timezone indicator 'Z' when using the DateFormat pattern "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'". By dissecting the source code of DefaultDateTypeAdapter, it reveals Gson's three-tier waterfall parsing strategy: first attempting the local format, then the US English format, and finally falling back to the ISO 8601 format. The article explains in detail why date strings with milliseconds are correctly parsed to the local timezone, while those without milliseconds are parsed to UTC, causing time shifts. Complete code examples and solutions are provided to help developers properly handle date data in different formats.