How to check the string is a Date

Question

I need to check the string against all possible dateFormats and need to check its valid date or not.

The problem I am facing is I can't predict the date format as its getting from some other web sources. One example is September 21 2012 1255 PM ET, .But the format may vary.

Ask for a dedicated API. Much better than screen scraping. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Sep 24 '12 at 06:27 — Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen, Sep 24 '12 at 06:27

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 24 '12 at 06:54

I suggest that you implement your own Parse method and use regular expressions to determine how the string should be parsed. You should not expect to parse a date with any format without knowing which it is.

Personally I would implement something like this (but then again, I haven´t coded Java in quite some time):

public SimpleDateFormat ParseDate(string s)
{
SimpleDateFormat parsedDate;
if(s.matches("0?[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])/(0?[1-9]|1[012])/((19|20)\\d\\d"))
   parsedDate = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
else if(s.matches([PATTERN2]))
   parsedDate = new SimpleDateFormat([DATE PATTERN 2]);
...
return parsedDate;
}

and so on...

How to check the string is a Date

1 Answers1