Parsing ill-formated date-time string in Java

Question

In one sentence: Should I be able to parse "04 Dec 2014 pm 1:58" by PrettyTime?

Descriptive: I am in need to parse & get proper date format from some ill formatted date-time string. e.g. "04 Dec 2014 pm 1:58". When I do parse this example string, I get : "Thu Dec 04 02:59:33 ALMT 2014" which is I believe my current time stamp.

Consideration: if I had only this single ill-format, I could write my SimpleDateFormat. But there can a good varieties of formatting which are mostly going to be ill-formatted.

Can any of you kindly tell me, whether should I expect PrettyTime to parse for this type of ill-formatted string? Or could you please point to any Java library which can handle these type of ill formatted date strings in Java?

Is PrettyTime not mainly for formatting and not for parsing ? `But there can a good varieties of formatting`, so you need to cover the most important ones with SimpleDateFormat. — PeterMmm, Dec 04 '14 at 08:28
@PeterMmm, PrettyTime is mainly for NLP. I was expecting it to be able to handle this sort of poorly formatted strings. However, lets see what our community says. If there is no direct solution, I have to write a good amount of SimpleDateFormat myself. :| — Amit K. Saha, Dec 04 '14 at 09:02

janasainik · Answer 1 · 2014-12-04T08:32:35.967

1

This might help you!

SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("dd MMM yyyy a hh:mm");
        String dateInString1 = "04 Dec 2014 pm 1:58";

        try {

            Date date = formatter.parse(dateInString1);
            System.out.println(date);
            System.out.println(formatter.format(date));

        } catch (ParseException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

edited Dec 04 '14 at 08:32

answered Dec 04 '14 at 08:23

janasainik

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With HH you will get 01:18, not 13:58. It's not correct! – Ruslan Ostafiichuk Dec 04 '14 at 08:31
Yes, it should be 'hh'. Corrected it! – janasainik Dec 04 '14 at 08:32
@hemanth, Thanks but as I said before, it is not the single one format. If it was the only format, I could code as you have replied. There are different formats & variations. So I was looking for any library or solution which does that part automatically. – Amit K. Saha Dec 04 '14 at 08:58
2

Seems this will not be possible(or some deep customization required!) as you should inform JVM about the format of date string that appears. – janasainik Dec 04 '14 at 09:01
@hemanth, agreed with you. but PrettyTime is a very good NLP. So I just hoped it may help me here :( – Amit K. Saha Dec 04 '14 at 09:17

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 10 '14 at 08:18

Apparently, after days of various attempts, my finding is PrettyTime is not capable to do so though it handles pretty good NLP date & time related stuffs. Finally I ended up with various SimpleDateFormat . Not the best solution rather a temporary solution. If anyone stumble upon this thread, please share your experiences.

Parsing ill-formated date-time string in Java

2 Answers2