Question

I’m trying to parse a Finnish date using the examples I’ve found here on Stack Overflow but I keep getting a parsing exception.

Here’s my snippet:

SimpleDateFormat dftFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd MMMM yyyy", new Locale("fi", "FI"));
Date datDate = dftFormat.parse("25 syyskuu 2012");

The DateFormat characters seem to the same as the one in English so i’m wondering why this doesn’t work.

Here’s the information about the Finnish locale.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It seems that all Finnish dates end with a ta i.e. syyskuu becomes syyskuuta.

The locale reference that I gave was wrong. If you see that link, you’ll notice that the ta is missing and that was some misleading information. I couldn’t find the exact locale information for the Finnish locale in the Javadocs.

I learnt a lesson, thanks to @Eis and @Fildor, print out the date using your parsing format to see what the resultant string is. Then you can compare whether your input string is parseable using the format.

Here’s how I tested my code:

Date datDate = dftFormat.parse("25 syyskuuta 2012");
System.out.println(new SimpleDateFormat("dd MMMM yyyy").format(datDate));