Incorrect 'DateTimeFormat' pattern

Reports incorrect date time format patterns.

The following errors are reported:

Unsupported pattern letters, like "TT"
Using reserved characters, like "#"
Incorrect use of padding
Unbalanced brackets
Incorrect amount of consecutive pattern letters

Examples:

  DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("[][]]"); // Closing ']' without previous opening '['
  DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("TT"); // Illegal pattern letter 'T'
  DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("{"); // Use of reserved character '{'
  DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("MMMMMM"); // Too many consecutive pattern letters 'M'

Locating this inspection

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IncorrectDateTimeFormat

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New in 2022.3

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection IncorrectDateTimeFormat

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025