Parsing a date’s ordinal indicator ( st, nd, rd, th ) in a date-time string

java simpledateformat date-parsing
hao picture hao · Feb 14, 2015 · Viewed 13.7k times · Source

I checked the SimpleDateFormat javadoc, but I am not able to find a way to parse the ordinal indicator in a date format like this:

 Feb 13th 2015 9:00AM

I tried "MMM dd yyyy hh:mma", but the days have to be in number for it to be correct?

Is it possible to parse the "13th" date using a SimpleDateFormat without having to truncate the string?

Answer

Bohemian picture Bohemian · Feb 14, 2015

Java's SimpleDateFormat doesn't support an ordinal suffix, but the ordinal suffix is just eye candy - it is redundant and can easily be removed to allow a straightforward parse:

Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd yyyy hh:mma")
    .parse(str.replaceAll("(?<=\\d)(st|nd|rd|th)", ""));

The replace regex is so simple because those sequences won't appear anywhere else in a valid date.

To handle any language that appends any length of ordinal indicator characters from any language as a suffix:

Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd yyyy hh:mma")
    .parse(str.replaceAll("(?<=\\d)(?=\\D* \\d+ )\\p{L}+", ""));

Some languages, eg Mandarin, prepend their ordinal indicator, but that could be handled too using an alternation - left as an exercise for the reader :)

Related questions

Why SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy") parses date to 10/20/20128?

I have this code: DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy"); dateFormat.setLenient(false); Date date = dateFormat.parse("10/20/20128"); and I would expect the dateFormat.parse call to throw ParseException since the year I'm providing is 5 characters long instead of 4 like …

Read More
String-Date conversion with nanoseconds

I've been struggling for a while with this piece of code for an Android app and I can't get the hang of it. I've read and tried every solution I found on stackoverflow and other places, but still no luck. …

Read More
Simpledateformat unparseable date

I have a String in a database (match.getDate) that has the following date format: 01/04/2018 This is the date I want to format, stored as day/month/year. I want to format this for my Android app. I want to …

Read More