Question

I need to parse a string like ‘February 12, 1981’ as a Date. I use SimpleDateFormat. But if I do:

new SimpleDateFormat('MMMMM dd, yyyy').parse('February 12, 1981') 

I get java.text.ParseException.

I tried to reduce it to see where the problem is. First:

new SimpleDateFormat('MMMMM').parse('February') 

works. Then:

new SimpleDateFormat('MMMMM dd').parse('February 12') 

doesn’t work anymore. Anyone know why? I also tried new SimpleDateFormat('MMMMM' 'dd').

I’m using JRE 1.6.0_06.

Answer 1

What version of JDK/JRE are you using?

This works fine for me with 1.4.2_14, 1.5.0_16, and 1.6.0_07:

SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat('MMMMM dd, yyyy'); Date parsed = df.parse('February 12, 1981'); System.out.println(parsed); 

output:

Thu Feb 12 00:00:00 EST 1981