I apologize for this noob-level question, but I'm angry at SimpleDateFormat and am wondering in anyone knows how to make it do what I want.

My issue is that I'm using SimpleDateFormat to basically validate different types of dates. This usually works fine, except with the terminating field of a date. For example, I parse the String "08/21/2007" against the format "MM/dd/yyyy" and confirm the date is valid.

My problem occurs when the user enters "bad" data for the year. If non-valid character are put in the month or date fields, they are handled with an error perfectly fine. However, if the user enters a letter somewhere in the year (say they use the letter O instead of a zero) SimpleDateFormat just views it as a terminating character. In short, the string "08/27/2OO7" (with letter O's) is parsed to "08/27/2" when it should be throwing an error. Is there any way to force SimpleDateFormat's parse to check the entire string?

I haven't been able to find a way to change the behavior of the parse method to throw an exception in this scenario. There is a setLenient(boolean B) method, but it does not solve the problem. My advice to you is to validate the date you get to see if it is too long ago. If you don't have a "valid" date range then you can test the date portion of the string with Integer.parseInt, but that kind of defeats the purpose of letting SimpleDateFormat parse it for you.

This post has been edited by skyhawk133: 21 Aug, 2007 - 03:57 PM

the date formats in java are messed up and complicated to convert and compare. Hopefully it will be addressed in an upcoming update.
alcdotcom is right, it's about your best choice.