With this example we are going to demonstrate how to parse custom formatted date with SimpleDateFormat. SimpleDateFormat is a concrete class for formatting and parsing dates in a locale-sensitive manner. It allows formatting (date -> text), parsing (text -> date), and normalization. In short, to parse custom formatted date with SimpleDateFormat you should:
- Create a new SimpleDateFormat, using a String pattern. The pattern describes the date and time format.
- Invoke the
parse(String source)API method to parse text from the beginning of the given string to produce a date. It will return a Date parsed from the string.
Let’s take a look at the code snippet that follows:
package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.core;
import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
public class ParseCustomFormattedDateWithSimpleDateFormat {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm");
// parse string in custom format into date object
Date date = df.parse("10/11/2011 16:24");
System.out.println(date);
}
catch (ParseException pe) {
System.out.println("Parse Exception : " + pe.getMessage());
}
}
}
Output:
Thu Nov 10 16:24:00 EET 2011
This was an example of how to parse custom formatted date with SimpleDateFormat in Java.
