Name: mc57594			Date: 02/28/97


The class TimeZone handles time zone ids such as:
  EST, CST, MST, PST, AST, HST
in the getTimeZone() method.

But the SimpleDateFormat class parse() method only recognizes
a subset of those time zone ids.

For example:
  8 DEC 1996 7:00:00 PST
can be parsed, but
  8 DEC 1996 7:00:00 AST
results in NullPointerException in parse().


In addition, the GMT notation is NOT supported by 
TimeZone.getTimeZone(String).  

For example:
  TimeZone.getTimeZone("AST")
will work just fine, but
  TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT-9:00")
simply returns a null object.


Bottom line
-----------
TimeZone.getTimeZone(String) and SimpleDateFormat("zzz")
should recognize and handle the same time zone notations.


Here is code to demonstrate these two points:

import java.util.*;
import java.text.*;

class bug {

        public static void processTime(String timeString, String tzString) {

                TimeZone tz = TimeZone.getTimeZone(tzString);
                if (tz == null)
                {
                        System.out.println("** Timezone " + tzString + " not recognized **");
                        return;
                }

                try {
                        SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("d MMM
 yyyy h:mm:ss zzz");
                        Date val = formatter.parse(timeString);
                        formatter.setTimeZone(tz);
                        System.out.println("Date: " + formatter.format(val));
                }
                catch (Exception e) {
                        e.printStackTrace();
                }
        }

        public static void main(String[] args) {

                System.out.println("This works...");
                processTime("8 DEC 1996 7:00:00 PST", "PST");
                System.out.println();
                System.out.println("This fails...");
                processTime("8 DEC 1996 7:00:00 AST", "AST");
                System.out.println();
                System.out.println("This also fails...");
                processTime("8 DEC 1996 7:00:00 GMT-9:00", "GMT-9:00");
        }
}
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