Fri Mar 05 00:21:21 CET 2010 to UTC

Question

Hey
For my Last.fm scrobbler I need to provide a timestamp in UTC:
The time the track started playing, in UNIX timestamp format (integer number of seconds since 00:00:00, January 1st 1970 UTC). This must be in the UTC time zone, and is required.However, when I retrieve my date, it is as follows:
Fri Mar 05 00:21:21 CET 2010date.getTime() results in a CET timestamp.
How can I convert an existing Date to UTC so I can get the UTC timestamp?
Or - I use a DateFormat to parse a String like:
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:33:01 +0100How do I convert this String to an UTC timestamp?
Both questions are basically equal, I don't know what's the easiest approach.
Thanks in advance,
Niek

Answer 1

Thanks for your reaction!
What I have now:
DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z", Locale.ENGLISH);
                        Date d = formatter.parse(startTime);
                        SimpleDateFormat sdf  = new SimpleDateFormat();
                        sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
                        System.out.println(sdf.format(d));This results in "5-3-10 0:17" being written to System.out (SimpleDateFormat.format(Date) returns a String). This output is correct (in UTC).
However, I need the timestamp in milliseconds. Should I again parse this result as in line 2? Or can I do this a more efficient way?