Date Formatting.

[Arnav Velimala]

Hi,

I'm trying to validate a data using SimpleDateFormat. The input is expected to be of the format : "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss.SSS". Following is the method I used to validate.

  public boolean validDate(final String createdOn) {
boolean valid = true;
if (Utilities.isEmpty(createdOn)) {
return false;
}
try {
new SimpleDateFormat(IApplicationConstants.DATE_FORMAT)
.parse(createdOn);
} catch (final ParseException pe) {
valid = false;
}
return valid;
}  

Now my question is :
it is returning true even if I give following (invalid??)date formats:
"2008-14-18 05:43:28.09""20-12-2008 05:43:28.7897"

[Mark Vedder]

Take a look at the DateFormat.html.setLenient(boolean) method. It is set to true by default. As such the parse method may

use heuristics to interpret inputs that do not precisely match this object's format.

If you set this to false your code will does what you expect.

So that the code does not need to create a new DateFormat object each time and incur the cost of parsing the date pattern, you might want to consider making that object an instance variable. Then you only incur the cost of parsing the actual date string and not both the pattern and the date string each time the method is called.