Reformat custom date from string

I‘m fetching dates which have the format yyyy-MM-dd.
I have these extracted as a string which would look like this:

String date = "2020-09-05";

Now I want to convert it into a EEE, d MMM yyyy format, so the result should be: Sat, 5 Sep 2020.
I tried reformatting it like this:

Date convertedDate = new SimpleDateFormat(EEE, d MMM yyyy).parse(date);

For some reason this and many tries to get around it all end up with a java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date "2020-09-05".

Can‘t I convert a date from a string like that? Is there a better way to reformat a string into other formats?

You need to make a distinction between parsing the date (turning a String into a Date or LocalDate class) and formatting a date (turning the Date or LocalDate class instance to a String).

To parse the initial string, use:

LocalDate convertedDate = LocalDate.parse(date)

To format the convertedDate, use:

String formattedDate = convertedDate.format(DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("EEE, d MMM yyyy"))

EDIT: I am assuming you are at least on Java 8, so you can use the newer date/time classes. See https://www.baeldung.com/java-8-date-time-intro for some more info.

You are mixing up parsing and formatting: your code is trying to parse a string given the format. You’re telling Java you’re expecting the date to contain the week name.

You need to first parse your date in the format it’s in. This will give you a date. You next need format your date with the desired format, which will give you a string:

final String dateString = "2020-09-05";
final Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("y-M-d").parse(dateString);
final String converted = new SimpleDateFormat("E, d MMM y").format(date);

ok here's the code:

String sDate1="1998-12-31";
		DateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
        Date date = sdf.parse(sDate1);
 
        System.out.println("EEE, d MMM yyyy formatted date : " + new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy").format(date));