Parsing Strings into Dates in Java

The SimpleDateFormat class has some additional methods, notably parse( ) , which tries to parse a string according to the format stored in the given SimpleDateFormat object. For example:

import java.util.*;
import java.text.*;
public class DateDemo {
public static void main(String args[]) {
SimpleDateFormat ft = new SimpleDateFormat ("yyyy-MM-dd");
String input = args.length == 0 ? "1818-11-11" : args[0];
System.out.print(input + " Parses as ");
Date t;
try {
t = ft.parse(input);
System.out.println(t);
} catch (ParseException e) {
System.out.println("Unparseable using " + ft);
}
}
}

A sample run of the above program would produce following result:

$ java DateDemo
1818-11-11 Parses as Wed Nov 11 00:00:00 GMT 1818
$ java DateDemo 2007-12-01
2007-12-01 Parses as Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 GMT 2007