String to Date in Java

Question

HI,

I am converting String to Date format. But it returns wrong dates. for example,

String startDate = "08-05-2010"; //  (MM/dd/yyyy)

I want to convert this to "Date" object like this, 05-JUL-10

How to do that? I tried like this

SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yy");
scal1.setTime(dateFormat.parse((startDate)));

but i am getting "Unparseable date:" .

Answer 1

Unless you've left something out, it looks like you're trying to parse it with the wrong format, i.e. you have an mm-dd-yyyy, and you're trying to parse it with the format dd-MMM-yy. Try a separate date format for what you're parsing from what you're encoding.

Answer 2

SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat(“yyyy-MM-dd”);
String strDate = “2007-12-25″;
Date date = null;
try {

   date = format.parse(strDate);

} catch (ParseException ex) {

   ex.printStackTrace();

}

Answer 3

If you want to convert a date string of one format to another format, you can use format() and parse() methods of SimpleDateFormat class

First you need to parse the string to a date object using parse() method setting the source pattern and then format the date object using format() method setting the target pattern:

SimpleDateFormat sourceFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MM-dd-yyyy");
Date sourceFormatDate = sourceFormat.parse("08-05-2010");
SimpleDateFormat destFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yy");
String destFormatDateString = destFormat.format(sourceFormatDate);
System.out.println(destFormatDateString); // 05-Aug-10

Answer 4

The format dd-MMM-yy you use to parse the string is wrong; the format should be dd-MM-yyyy.

String startDate = "08-05-2010";
DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy");
Date date = dateFormat.parse((startDate));

Note that Date objects themselves do not have a format: a Date objects just represents a date and time value, just like an int is just a number, and doesn't have any inherent formatting information. If you want to display the Date in a certain format, you'll have to use a DateFormat object again to format it:

DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MMM-yy");
System.out.println(dateFormat.format(date));
// output: 08-May-10