SimpleDateFormat to Timestamp loses precision with getTime() method

Question

I've got a method to parse a String (yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS) to a Date object using SimpleDateFormat.

public static Timestamp convertToTimestamp(String stringToFormat) {
    SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
    try {
        Date date = dateFormat.parse(stringToFormat);
        Timestamp tstamp = new Timestamp(date.getTime());
        return tstamp;
    } 
    catch (ParseException e) {
        return null;
    }
}

However, when the Milliseconds end in 0, eg "2013-07-07 19:15:00.000", when I do the following to assign it to a Timestamp object:

Timestamp tstamp = new Timestamp(date.getTime());

the output is the following 2013-07-07 19:15:00.0

Is there any way to keep my precision of three decimal places on the Milliseconds? I realise I could probably do some sort of length check and manually add on 0's, but a more efficient, standard way of keeping this precision would be preferred

Answer 1

The precision is not lost: the trailing zeros are simply truncated.

You can verify it with:

Date dt = new Date();

dt.setTime(123); //123 milliseconds
Timestamp tstamp = new Timestamp(dt.getTime());
System.out.println("tstamp = " + tstamp);

dt.setTime(0); //0 milliseconds => truncated
tstamp = new Timestamp(dt.getTime());
System.out.println("tstamp = " + tstamp);

which prints:

tstamp = 1970-01-01 01:00:00.123
tstamp = 1970-01-01 01:00:00.0