How to sanity check a date in Java

Question

I find it curious that the most obvious way to create Date objects in Java has been deprecated and appears to have been "substituted" with a not so obvious to use lenient calendar.

How do you check that a date, given as a combination of day, month, and year, is a valid date?

For instance, 2008-02-31 (as in yyyy-mm-dd) would be an invalid date.

Answer 1

Key is df.setLenient(false);. This is more than enough for simple cases. If you are looking for a more robust (I doubt) and/or alternate libraries like joda-time then look at the answer by the user "tardate"

final static String DATE_FORMAT = "dd-MM-yyyy";

public static boolean isDateValid(String date) 
{
        try {
            DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT);
            df.setLenient(false);
            df.parse(date);
            return true;
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            return false;
        }
}

Answer 2

An alternative strict solution using the standard library is to perform the following:

1) Create a strict SimpleDateFormat using your pattern

2) Attempt to parse the user entered value using the format object

3) If successful, reformat the Date resulting from (2) using the same date format (from (1))

4) Compare the reformatted date against the original, user-entered value. If they're equal then the value entered strictly matches your pattern.

This way, you don't need to create complex regular expressions - in my case I needed to support all of SimpleDateFormat's pattern syntax, rather than be limited to certain types like just days, months and years.

Answer 3

// to return valid days of month, according to month and year
int returnDaysofMonth(int month, int year) {
    int daysInMonth;
    boolean leapYear;
    leapYear = checkLeap(year);
    if (month == 4 || month == 6 || month == 9 || month == 11)
        daysInMonth = 30;
    else if (month == 2)
        daysInMonth = (leapYear) ? 29 : 28;
    else
        daysInMonth = 31;
    return daysInMonth;
}

// to check a year is leap or not
private boolean checkLeap(int year) {
    Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
    cal.set(Calendar.YEAR, year);
    return cal.getActualMaximum(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR) > 365;
}

Answer 4

Above methods of date parsing are nice , i just added new check in existing methods that double check the converted date with original date using formater, so it works for almost each case as i verified. e.g. 02/29/2013 is invalid date. Given function parse the date according to current acceptable date formats. It returns true if date is not parsed successfully.

 public final boolean validateDateFormat(final String date) {
        String[] formatStrings = {"MM/dd/yyyy"};
        boolean isInvalidFormat = false;
        Date dateObj;
        for (String formatString : formatStrings) {
            try {
                SimpleDateFormat sdf = (SimpleDateFormat) DateFormat.getDateInstance();
                sdf.applyPattern(formatString);
                sdf.setLenient(false);
                dateObj = sdf.parse(date);
                System.out.println(dateObj);
                if (date.equals(sdf.format(dateObj))) {
                    isInvalidFormat = false;
                    break;
                }
            } catch (ParseException e) {
                isInvalidFormat = true;
            }
        }
        return isInvalidFormat;
    }

Answer 5

Here's what I did for Node environment using no external libraries:

Date.prototype.yyyymmdd = function() {
   var yyyy = this.getFullYear().toString();
   var mm = (this.getMonth()+1).toString(); // getMonth() is zero-based
   var dd  = this.getDate().toString();
   return zeroPad([yyyy, mm, dd].join('-'));  
};

function zeroPad(date_string) {
   var dt = date_string.split('-');
   return dt[0] + '-' + (dt[1][1]?dt[1]:"0"+dt[1][0]) + '-' + (dt[2][1]?dt[2]:"0"+dt[2][0]);
}

function isDateCorrect(in_string) {
   if (!matchesDatePattern) return false;
   in_string = zeroPad(in_string);
   try {
      var idate = new Date(in_string);
      var out_string = idate.yyyymmdd();
      return in_string == out_string;
   } catch(err) {
      return false;
   }

   function matchesDatePattern(date_string) {
      var dateFormat = /[0-9]+-[0-9]+-[0-9]+/;
      return dateFormat.test(date_string); 
   }
}

And here is how to use it:

isDateCorrect('2014-02-23')
true

Answer 6

Building on answer of @Pangea to fix the problem pointed out by @ceklock, I added a method to verify that the dateString doesn't contain any invalid character.

Here is how I do:

private boolean isDateCorrect(String dateString) {
    try {
        Date date = mDateFormatter.parse(dateString);
        Calendar calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
        calendar.setTime(date);
        return matchesOurDatePattern(dateString);    //added my method
    }
    catch (ParseException e) {
        return false;
    }
}

/**
 * This will check if the provided string matches our date format
 * @param dateString
 * @return true if the passed string matches format 2014-1-15 (YYYY-MM-dd)
 */
private boolean matchesDatePattern(String dateString) {
    return dateString.matches("^\\d+\\-\\d+\\-\\d+");
}