Question

I know how SimpleDateFormat works, by grabbing sdfDateTime.format(new Date(System.currentTimeMillis())); which is today’s date from the System. Can SimpleDateFormat format a date by grabbing a string? Let’s say you had a string: String dateStr = "04/05/2012"; how would you format that into: “April 5, 2012”?

Answer 1

DateFormat inputFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
inputFormat.setLenient(false);
DateFormat outputFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MMMM dd, yyyy");
outputFormat.setLenient(false);

String inputDateAsString = "04/05/2012";
Date inputDate = inputFormat.parse(inputDateAsString);
System.out.println(outputFormat.format(inputDate));

You can’t just grab an arbitrary string and figure out what its format is.