Question

my application takes in a string like this “2002-10-15 10:55:01.000000”. I need to validate that the string is a valid for a db2 timestamp.

How can I do this?

EDIT: This mostly works

     public static boolean isTimeStampValid(String inputString) {
     SimpleDateFormat format = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSSSSS");
        try {
            format.parse(inputString);
            return true;
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            return false;
        }
     }

The problem is that if I pass it a bad format for milliseconds like “2011-05-02 10:10:01.0av” this will pass validation. I am assuming that since the first millisecond character is valid then it just truncates the rest of the string.

Answer 1

I’m not exactly sure about the format but you you can play around it and can try something like this

public static bool isTimeStampValid(String inputString)
{ 
    SimpleDateFormat format = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSSSSS");
    try{
       format.parse(inputString);
       return true;
    }
    catch(ParseException e)
    {
        return false;
    }
}

EDIT: if you want to validate for numbers after successful parsing, you could do

       format.parse(inputString);
       Pattern p = Pattern.compile("^\\d{4}[-]?\\d{1,2}[-]?\\d{1,2} \\d{1,2}:\\d{1,2}:\\d{1,2}[.]?\\d{1,6}$");
       return p.matcher(inputString).matches();

instead of

   format.parse(inputString);
   return true;