title: Groovy Date Parsing -- X is an illegal pattern character
body: <p>I have the following date string: <code>2011-09-06T22:02:57-04:00</code>. The problem is the timezone, <strong>-04:00</strong>. The Java7 docs say I can use <code>XXX</code> to magically match this timezone string: <a href="http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html">http://download.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html</a></p>
  
  <p>The problem is that Groovy does not support the <code>X</code> character, presumably because it's not using JDK7 yet. The <code>z</code> character doesn't work because it isn't <code>GMT-07:00</code>, only <code>-07:00</code> What is the easiest way to parse this timezone?</p>
  
  <p>-tjw</p>