SimpleDateFormat problems with 2 year date

Question

I\'m trying to understand two things:

1. Why doesn\'t the following code throw an exception (since the SimpleDateFormat is not lenient)
2. It d

Answer 1

According to the SimpleDateFormat javadoc for JDK 1.6,

For parsing, the number of pattern letters is ignored unless it's needed to separate two adjacent fields.

A look at the source code for the method that does the work, SimpleDateFormat.parse(String, ParsePosition), confirms this. There is a variable obeyCount that is true if the pattern has no delimiters, like "yyyyMMdd", and false otherwise. With your pattern the parser looks for 3 numbers separated by 2 delimiters and does not care about the number of digits in each position.

The answers to your questions:

1. Lenient is not a factor when delimiters are used.
2. You did not call SimpleDateFormat.set2DigitYearStart so why should the code do what you didn't tell it to do?