Determine if a String is a valid date before parsing

Question

I have this situation where I am reading about 130K records containing dates stored as String fields. Some records contain blanks (nulls), some contain strings like this: \'

Answer 1

A simple utility class I have written for my project. Hope this helps someone.

Usage examples:

DateUtils.multiParse("1-12-12");
DateUtils.multiParse("2-24-2012");
DateUtils.multiParse("3/5/2012");
DateUtils.multiParse("2/16/12");




public class DateUtils {

    private static List dateFormats = new ArrayList();



    private Utils() {
        dateFormats.add(new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yy")); // must precede yyyy
        dateFormats.add(new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy"));
        dateFormats.add(new SimpleDateFormat("MM-dd-yy"));
        dateFormats.add(new SimpleDateFormat("MM-dd-yyyy"));            

    }
        private static Date tryToParse(String input, SimpleDateFormat format) {
        Date date  = null;
        try {
            date = format.parse(input);
        } catch (ParseException e) {

        }

        return date;
    }

        public static Date multiParse(String input)  {
        Date date = null;
        for (SimpleDateFormat format : dateFormats) {
            date = tryToParse(input, format);
            if (date != null) break;
        }
        return date;
    }
}