1

Is their a method in java to check weather a given string is Date or not.
example:

 String s="Hello"              //is not Date <br>
 String s="01/05/2014"         //is a valid date

thank You.

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4
  • 3
    Try to parse it with a SimpleDateFormat and see if that works. Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 13:18
  • Florent Bayle's solution is perfect if the format is known pre-parsing. If OP is looking for a universal dateValidator much like PHP's (utterly broken) strtotime then I'm afraid he's out of luck. Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 13:20
  • I would test it with a regular expression. For example [0-9]{1,2}\/[0-9]{1,2}\/[0-9]{4}. Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 13:21
  • I think a two-step solution is in many situations preferable: First, use the regex (@ChristopheDeTroyer) to check if the string looks like a date; if it matches, use SimpleDateFormat.parse to verfiy that it is a valid date. Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 13:29

2 Answers 2

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2

You can check for a specific format using SimpleDateFormat ex:

DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("mm/dd/yyyy");

try
{
   df.parse("01/05/2014");
}
catch(Exception e)
{
  //not a date
}
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3 Comments

I would rather catch for ParseException.
@Journeycorner that is fine too you can catch whatever exception you want
@brs05: It would hide (runtime)exceptions. Imagine the input is null, doing it your way the NullPointerException would also be caught - not the finest way imho.
2

Write simple API that will validate string is date or not,

If isValidDate(String date) return true then your string is date otherwise it is not date.

public boolean isValidDate(String date){
   SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("mm/dd/yyyy");
   boolean flag = true;

   try{
      dateFormat.parse(date); 
   }catch(ParseException e){
      flag = false;
   }
 return flag;
}
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1 Comment

Don't catch Exception, try ParseException instead.

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