Parsing date string (MM-dd) to java date in defaul

Question

I'd like to parse string in MM-dd format to java date. Since year is not specified, parsed date should be in current year. Only valid date string should be parsed, so I should use setLenient(false) in SimpleDateFormat.

public static Date parseDate(String ds) throws ParseException {
    SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("MM-dd");
    df.setLenient(false);
    Date d = df.parse(ds);
    Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
    int year = cal.get(Calendar.YEAR);
    cal.setTime(d);
    cal.set(Calendar.YEAR, year);
    return cal.getTime();
}

This seems to work well until I pass an argument "02-29". This year(2012) is leap year and 2012-02-29 is valid date, "02-29" should have been parsed successfully.

I found that when I don't specify year part in SimpleDateFormat, it parse to year 1970. And 1970 is not a leap year, "02-29" fails to parse. So, parsing to date of year 1970 and set current year after parsing strategy is not perfect.

What is the best way to parse MM-dd format string to date (date should be set to current year) in Java?

PS1: I searched this topic and found many questions and answers in this site, but I couldn't find the satisfactory answer. PS2: df.setLenient(false); is important because only valid date string should be parsed successfully. Invalid date strings like "01-32", "02-30", etc. shouldn't be parsed.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Get the year from the calendar as you do in the code, set the parse format string to MM-dd-yyyy and then do

 Date d = df.parse(ds + "-" + year);

Answer 2

This could be considered a little hacky, but you could always just tack the year onto the end of the date string before parsing, like this:

ds += "-" + Calendar.getInstance().get(Calendar.YEAR);
SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("MM-dd-yyyy");
// Parse date as usual