Java parsing date

Question

Hello i am currently looking for parsing a date in groovy/java

the format is "June 13 2003" ( not so exotic !!! )

A simple look at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html give me some clues

Month: If the number of pattern letters is 3 or more, the month is interpreted as text; otherwise, it is interpreted as a number.

Year : if the number of pattern letters is more than 2, the year is interpreted literally

So i would guess that "MMMM d yyyy" is fine But even trying other patterns : "MMM d yyyy","M d yyyy","MMM dd yyyy", none of them works .......

    Date dateParsed = new SimpleDateFormat("MMMM d yyyy").parse("June 13 2003")
    println dateParsed

gives me an exception :

Exception in thread "main" java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "June 13 2003"

Answer 1

Your formats should work, the problem might be locale - if your system is not in english locale by default, it tries to parse your local month names, instead of the english variants.

Try

new SimpleDateFormat("MMMM dd yyyy", java.util.Locale.ENGLISH)

Answer 2

import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

public class test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
        Date dateParsed = new SimpleDateFormat("MMMM d yyyy").parse("June 13 2003");
        System.out.println(dateParsed);
    }
}

This works fine for me. Prints Fri Jun 13 00:00:00 EEST 2003

Answer 3

tl;dr

LocalDate.parse( 
    "June 13 2003" , 
    DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern( "MMMM d uuuu" )
                     .withLocale( Locale.US )
)

java.time

The modern way is with the java.time classes.

The LocalDate class represents a date-only value without time-of-day and without time zone.

Use DateTimeFormatter to parse a string that is not in ISO 8601 format. The crucial part is to specify a Locale to determine the human language to use in translating the name of month, English is this case.

DateTimeFormatter f = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern( "MMMM d uuuu" ) ;
f = f.withLocale( Locale.UK );  // Or Locale.US, or Locale.ENGLISH, or Locale.CANADA_FRENCH, whatever matches your inputs.
LocalDate ld = LocalDate.parse( "June 13 2003" , f ) ;

2003-06-13

See code in action, in IdeOne.com.

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About java.time

The java.time framework is built into Java 8 and later. These classes supplant the troublesome old legacy date-time classes such as java.util.Date, Calendar, & SimpleDateFormat.

The Joda-Time project, now in maintenance mode, advises migration to java.time.

To learn more, see the Oracle Tutorial. And search Stack Overflow for many examples and explanations. Specification is JSR 310.

Where to obtain the java.time classes?

• Java SE 8 and SE 9 and later
  • Built-in.
  • Part of the standard Java API with a bundled implementation.
  • Java 9 adds some minor features and fixes.
• Java SE 6 and SE 7
  • Much of the java.time functionality is back-ported to Java 6 & 7 in ThreeTen-Backport.
• Android
  • The ThreeTenABP project adapts ThreeTen-Backport (mentioned above) for Android specifically.
  • See How to use….

The ThreeTen-Extra project extends java.time with additional classes. This project is a proving ground for possible future additions to java.time. You may find some useful classes here such as Interval, YearWeek, YearQuarter, and more.