SimpleDateFormat: when day of month becomes day of week

Question

I have a weird situation where the SimpleDateFormat class seems to interpret the "dd" mark as day of week instead of day of month when I use a certain pattern. The following code demonstrates the problem:
public class ByteTest {
    public static final String PATTERN = "mm HH dd MM F";
    // public static final String PATTERN = "dd MM yyyy";
    public static void main(String [] args) throws Exception {
        String str = "11 11 08 11 1";
        // String str = "24 11 2004";
        System.out.println(strToDate(str, PATTERN));
    public static Date strToDate(String date, String pattern) throws ParseException {
        SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern);
        formatter.setLenient(false);
        return formatter.parse(date);
}The result (at least for me) is:
Exception in thread "main" java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "11 11 08 11 1"
at java.text.DateFormat.parse(DateFormat.java:335)
at ByteTest.strToDate(ByteTest.java:20)
at ByteTest.main(ByteTest.java:14)
When I change "dd" from 08 to 07, I get this:
Sat Nov 07 11:11:00 EET 1970
...and finally, when I change the pattern (done here by uncommenting the commented lines and commenting the ones above them), I get:
Wed Nov 24 00:00:00 EET 2004
So, as you can see, for some reason "dd" is interpreted as day of week number in the weirder pattern (which unfortunately we have to use in a pattern matching thing we are using). Any ideas?
When I comment the line with setLenient(false), it also works fine, but unfortunately we need to use that flag because otherwise users could input weird values for the various fields.
I tried adding Locale.UK to the parsing method, but that made no difference so clearly my locale (+02:00 GMT) is not at fault.
I also considered if the day might be out of range since using this pattern we get year 1970, but clocks start counting from 1.1.1970 right? So that doesn't seem a likely cause either. :-/
The markers for day of week in SimpleDateFormat are E and F; so I guess the question is, when does d become E or F...

Answer 1

I'm not sure I quite understand what the problem is... the reason why you can't parse that date is that it's invalid, Sunday November 8 on 1970 goes to the second week of the month, so day-of-week-in-month is 2, not 1.. so the string you should pass is "11 11 08 11 2"