I have dates in text format of the form dd-mmm-yy or d-mmm-y, where months are abbreviations in letters (for example, 4-Nov-09 or 12-Dec-05, etc...) I would like to parse it
You may need to use the SimpleDateFormat for parsing custom formats. This article explains the details of formatting.
"d-MMM-yyyy" corresponds to 4-Nov-2009