Intelligent date / time parser for Java

Question

Is there some intelligent date / time parser library for Java? By intelligent I mean, that I don\'t need to specify the date / time format. The API should be similar to this

Answer 1

No, there is not. What it should return on "01/02/03"? 1 Jan 2003, 3 Feb 2001, or 2 Mar 2001?

Answer 2

JodaTime is excellent for manipulating date objects (e.g. date.plusDays(10))

...but JChronic is what you want for natural language date parsing, e.g.

Chronic.parse("now")
Chronic.parse("tomorrow 15:00")
Chronic.parse("14/2/2001")
Chronic.parse("yesterday")
Chronic.parse("20 Jan 2010")

Your question is similar to this one.

Answer 3

Curious that you want to call that intelligent, just consider these:

• Is your 1.2.2010 the same as mine?
• What happens if the code is run on different time zones with varying locales?
• Should it follow some well established standard or invent its own entirely?

The answer to your question is no.

Answer 4

This isn't really going to be possible, or at least reliable enough.

For example, what date does the string 10/10/10 represent?

Answer 5

You can use org.pojava. This library smart enough to detect time format

import org.pojava.datetime.DateTime;
import java.util.Date;

public class Main{
    public static void main(String[] args){
        String input1 = "6-Jan-69";
        String input2 = "10 Apr 85 12:34:15";
        String input3 = "7/Mar/77";

        Date date1 = DateTime.parse(input1).toDate();
        Date date2 = DateTime.parse(input2).toDate();
        Date date3 = DateTime.parse(input3).toDate();

        System.out.println(date1);
        System.out.println(date2);
        System.out.println(date3);
    }
}

Output

Mon Jan 06 00:00:00 ICT 1969
Wed Apr 10 12:34:15 ICT 1985
Mon Mar 07 00:00:00 ICT 1977