Parsing Ambiguous Dates in Java

Question

Is there any way in Java to guess the date format when it is not explicitly defined?

For example a user types in 11Mar09 or 11-09-2009 or 11/09/2009 or 11-09 what is

Answer 1

You could have a bunch of regular expressions and cycle through until you find a match. I think you could also have a bunch of DateFormats and cycle through them, catching exceptions on ones that failed.

The first avoids using exceptions for non-exceptional cases, the second is maybe better from a design point of view in that you're using a date parsing framework for what it was designed for. But overall, I don't think either approach is necessarily "best" or "worst" per se-- more a matter of personal preferences/beliefs.