<p>I'm using SimpleDateFormat with the pattern <code>EEE MM/dd  hh:mma</code>, passing in the date String <code>Thu 10/9  08:15PM</code> and it's throwing an Unparseable date exception. Why? I've used various patterns with <code>SimpleDateFormat</code> before so I'm fairly familiar with its usage. Maybe I'm missing something obvious from staring at it too long.</p>

<p>The other possibility is funky (technical term) whitespace. The context is a screen-scraping app, where I'm using HtmlCleaner to tidy up the messy html.  While I've found HtmlCleaner to be pretty good overall, I've noticed strange issues with characters that look like whitespace but aren't recognized as such with a StringTokenizer, for example. I've mostly worked around it and haven't dug into the character encoding or anything like that but am starting to wonder.</p>

Try this instead for your pattern:
```
```
EEE MM/d hh:mma
```
```
The difference is the single
```
d
```
instead of double
```
dd
```
, since your date is for 10/9 instead of 10/09.