Question

is there a smart date parser in Java that would parse a variety of date formats without knowning ahead what the format is?
for example I can have the following formats:

21-3-1998,
March 2004, 2001, 
3/4/97
12-Dec-1998

is there a simple parse call(third party lib is ok) I can use to handle them call?

Answer 1

I don’t know if there is a good out-of-the-box choice, given almost unlimited number of permutations; but if I had to do it, I’d start with de-facto Java date package, Joda, and just do linear lookup with sequence of allowed data formats, and accept first one that parses succsefully.