title: Convert time represented as String containing timezone names ('z') to UTC time
body: <p>I want to convert Strings like <code>"20000603163334 GST"</code> or <code>"20000603163334 -0300"</code> to UTC time. The problem is that time zones in my strings can be 'general time zones', I mean they can be strings as CET, GST etc. etc. And I don't know how to convert these ones. </p>
  
  <p>Because of these string time zones I can not use Joda Time's <code>DateTimeFormat.forPattern("yyyyMMddhhmmss z").withZone(DateTimeZone.UTC);</code>, because according to the documentation:  <a href="http://www.joda.org/joda-time/apidocs/org/joda/time/format/DateTimeFormat.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">"Time zone names ('z') cannot be parsed"</a>.</p>
  
  <p>So, one question I have is if you know a method to go around this limitation in Joda Time? I would prefer to use Joda Time, if possible, instead of the standard Java API.</p>
  
  <p>Another in which I thought I can solve this problem with time zone's names is to use the Java's <code>SimpleDateFormat</code>.
  So I make something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>SimpleDateFormat f = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMddhhmmss z");
  //f.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
  f.setCalendar(new GregorianCalendar(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC")));
  Date time = f.parse("20000603163334 GST");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The <code>SimpleDateFormat</code> parses the <code>String</code> (I don't care here about the problem that there are multiple time zones with the same name - what this class parses it's good for me). </p>
  
  <p>The problem is that I don't know how to convert it from here to UTC. How can I do this?</p>
  
  <p>The fact that I set the <code>f's</code> time zone to UTC (in both the two ways from above) doesn't help. I hope someone can help me fix this, I read a lot of questions and answers on this theme here, on stackoverflow, but I haven't found a solution yet.</p>