ISO Date-time String to DateTime in Java Nov 14th, 2012 This requires Joda-Time. import org.joda.time.DateTime; import org.joda.time.DateTimeZone; import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormatter; import org.joda.time.format.ISODateTimeFormat; public class ISODateParsing { public static void main(String[] args) { DateTimeFormatter parser = ISODateTimeFormat.dateTimeNoMillis(); String str = "2012-01-01T00:00:00-0500"; DateTime dt = parser.parseDateTime(str); System.out.println(dt); } }