How work with Date, DateFormat

[Al Pearson]

I want to compare the date of an incoming cookie with today's date.
I can create today's ok with
Date datToday = new Date();
But how do I create an object with the date of the incoming Cookie. I would like to be able to just say something like:
Date datCookie = new Date("Sat Dec 15 19:53:44 CET 2001");
...but this is not legal. The Sun documentation says:
Deprecated. As of JDK version 1.1, replaced by DateFormat.parse(String s).
I find the documentation for DateFormat and other seemingly related classes (Calendar) to be confusing, with no sample code to point me in the right direction.
I'd appreciate some practical clues or sample code.
Alan

[Paul Stevens]

Here is a snippet that might help:

        java.util.Date dateObj = null;
        SimpleDateFormat inFormatter;
        inFormatter = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss");
        inFormatter.setLenient(true);
        dateObj = inFormatter.parse(pDateString, new java.text.ParsePosition(0));

The String passed into the SimpleDateFormat can be whatever format you want (dd-MMM-YYYY dd-MM-YY dd-MM-YYYY). The setLenient() method allows you to determine if an exact date format match is needed.

[Al Pearson]

Sorry for the late reply, Paul - I's been like vacatin'.
Thanks for the clue. To solve my problem, how to compare the date string of an incoming cookie,
in format "dd/MM/yyyy", with today's date, I did this and it works fine.

Calendar calendar = new GregorianCalendar();
calendar.getInstance();
int intMonth = calendar.get(Calendar.MONTH);
String strToday = calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH) +"/" +
++intMonth +"/" +
calendar.get(Calendar.YEAR);
SimpleDateFormat inFormatter = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");
Date datLastVisit = inFormatter.parse(strLastVisit, new ParsePosition(0));
Date datToday = inFormatter.parse(strToday, new ParsePosition(0));
if ( datLastVisit.before(datToday) ) {
etc, etc

a round of saspirellas on me!