Parse custom formatted date with SimpleDateFormat

Byron KiourtzoglouNovember 11th, 2012Last Updated: May 12th, 2013

0 341 1 minute read

With this example we are going to demonstrate how to parse custom formatted date with SimpleDateFormat. SimpleDateFormat is a concrete class for formatting and parsing dates in a locale-sensitive manner. It allows formatting (date -> text), parsing (text -> date), and normalization. In short, to parse custom formatted date with SimpleDateFormat you should:

Create a new SimpleDateFormat, using a String pattern. The pattern describes the date and time format.
Invoke the parse(String source) API method to parse text from the beginning of the given string to produce a date. It will return a Date parsed from the string.

Let’s take a look at the code snippet that follows:

package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.core;
 
import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
 
public class ParseCustomFormattedDateWithSimpleDateFormat {
     
    public static void main(String[] args) {
         
         
        try {
             
            DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm");
             
            // parse string in custom format into date object
            Date date = df.parse("10/11/2011 16:24");
            System.out.println(date);
             
        }
        catch (ParseException pe) {
            System.out.println("Parse Exception : " + pe.getMessage());
        }
         
    }
 
}