Question

Well aware of performance and thread issues with SimpleDateFormat, I decided to go with FastDateFormat, until I realized that FastDateFormat is for formatting only, no parsing!

Is there an alternative to FastDateFormat, that is ready to use out of the box and much faster than SimpleDateFormat?

I believe FastDateFormat is one of the faster ones, so anything that is about as fast would do.

Just curious , any idea why FastDateFormat does not support parsing? Doesn’t it seriously limit its use?

Answer 1

At a best guess, it’s to keep FastDateFormat… well… fast, by limiting it to display only.

Apache Commons DateUtils has a parseDate function, but that uses SimpleDateFormat internally.

An alternative is to use the JodaTime library. It’s a complete replacement for dealing with DateFormat, Date, and Calendar objects.

JodaTime has a DateTimeFormatter that can be used to create DateTime objects (JodaTime’s equivalent of Java’s Date objects) from strings.

An example of how to use it is like this:

String strInputDateTime = "2010-12-27"; // An example, this would really come from outside
DateTimeFormatter fmt = DateTimeFormat.forPattern("yyyy-MM-dd");
DateTime dt = fmt.parseDateTime(strInputDateTime);

I don’t know if this is really any faster than SimpleDateFormat, though.