Why does Java's Date.getYear() return 111 instead of 2011?

Question

I am having a bit of trouble parsing a string date to a Date object. I use a DateFormat to parse the string, and when I print the value of the date, it gives me what I expect.

But when I try get the day, the month or the year it gives me the wrong values. For instance, the year is 2011, but when I do .getYear() it gives me 111. I have no idea why this is happening. Here is the relevant code segment:

    Date dateFrom = null;

    String gDFString = g.getDateFrom();

    System.out.println(gDFString);

    DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");

    try {
        dateFrom = df.parse("04/12/2011");

        System.out.println(dateFrom);

        System.out.println(dateFrom.getYear());
    } catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

When I out print dateFrom, I get Sun Dec 04 00:00:00 GMT 2011, which is what you would expect. But printing .getYear() returns 111.

I need to be able to get the day, month and year of the date for a time series graph.

Answer 1

Those methods have been deprecated. Instead, use the Calendar class.

---

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;

public final class DateParseDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args){
         final DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
         final Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance();
         try {
             c.setTime(df.parse("04/12/2011"));
             System.out.println("Year = " + c.get(Calendar.YEAR));
             System.out.println("Month = " + (c.get(Calendar.MONTH)));
             System.out.println("Day = " + c.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH));
         } 
         catch (ParseException e) {
             e.printStackTrace();
         }
    }
}

Output:

Year = 2011
Month = 3
Day = 12

---

And as for the month field, this is 0-based. This means that January = 0 and December = 11. As stated by the javadoc,

Field number for get and set indicating the month. This is a calendar-specific value. The first month of the year in the Gregorian and Julian calendars is JANUARY which is 0; the last depends on the number of months in a year.