I want to parse some dates in Java, but the format is not defined and could be a lot of them (any ISO-8601 format which is already a lot, Unix timestamp in any unit, and more)
Here are some samples :
1970-01-01T00:00:00.00Z
1234567890
1234567890000
1234567890000000
2021-09-20T17:27:00.000Z+02:00
The perfect parsing might be impossible because of ambiguous cases but, a solution to parse most of the common dates with some logical might be achievable (for example timestamps are considered in seconds / milli / micro / nano in order to give a date close to the 2000 era, dates like '08/07/2021' could have a default for month and day distinction).
I didn't find any easy way to do it in Java while in python it is kind of possible (not working on all my samples but at least some of them) using infer_datetime_format of panda function to_datetime (https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.to_datetime.html).
Are there some easy approach in Java?
Well, first of all, I agree with rzwitserloot here that date parsing in free format is extremely difficult and full of ambiguities. So you are skating on thin ice and will eventually run into trouble if you just assume that a user input will be correctly parsed the way you think it will.
Nevertheless, we could make it work if I assume either of the following:
You simply don't care if it will be parsed incorrectly; or
You are doing this for fun or for learning purposes; or
You have a banner, saying:
If the parsing goes wrong, it's your fault. Don't blame us.
Anyway, the DateTimeFormatterBuilder is able to build a DateTimeFormatter which could be able to parse a lot of different patterns. Since a formatter supports optional parsing, it could be instructed to try to parse a certain value, or skip that part if no valid value could be found.
For instance, this builder is able to parse a fairly wide range of ISO-like dates, with many optional parts:
DateTimeFormatterBuilder builder = new DateTimeFormatterBuilder()
.appendPattern("uuuu-M-d")
.optionalStart()
.optionalStart().appendLiteral(' ').optionalEnd()
.optionalStart().appendLiteral('T').optionalEnd()
.appendValue(ChronoField.HOUR_OF_DAY)
.optionalStart()
.appendLiteral(':')
.appendValue(ChronoField.MINUTE_OF_HOUR)
.optionalStart()
.appendLiteral(':')
.appendValue(ChronoField.SECOND_OF_MINUTE)
.optionalStart()
.appendFraction(ChronoField.NANO_OF_SECOND, 1, 9, true)
.optionalEnd()
.optionalEnd()
.optionalEnd()
.appendPattern("[XXXXX][XXXX][XXX][XX][X]")
.optionalEnd();
DateTimeFormatter formatter = builder.toFormatter(Locale.ROOT);
All of the strings below can be successfully parsed by this formatter.
Stream.of(
"2021-09-28",
"2021-07-04T14",
"2021-07-04T14:06",
"2001-09-11 00:00:15",
"1970-01-01T00:00:15.446-08:00",
"2021-07-04T14:06:15.2017323Z",
"2021-09-20T17:27:00.000+02:00"
).forEach(testcase -> System.out.println(formatter.parse(testcase)));
Als you can see, with optionalStart() and optionalEnd(), you could define optional portions of the format.
There are many more patterns you probably want to parse. You could add those patterns to the abovementioned builder. Alternatively, the appendOptional​(DateTimeFormatter) method could be used to include multiple builders.
The perfect parsing might be impossible because of ambiguous cases but, a solution to parse most of the common dates with some logical might be achievable
Sure, and such wide-ranging guesswork should most definitely not be part of a standard java.* API. I think you're also wildly underestimating the ambiguity. 1234567890? It's just flat out incorrect to say that this can reasonably be parsed.
You are running into many, many problems here:
Java in general prefers throwing an error instead of guessing. This is inherent in the language (java has few optional syntax constructs; semicolons aren't optional, () for method invocations are not optional, java intentionally does not have 'truthy/false', i.e. if (foo) is only valid if foo is an expression of the boolean type, unlike e.g. python where you can stick anything in there and there's a big list of what counts as falsy, with the rest being considering truthy. When in rome, be like the romans: If this tenet annoys you, well, either learn to love it, begrudgingly accept it, or program in another language. This idea is endemic in the entire ecosystem. For what it is worth, given that debugging tends to take far longer than typing the optional constructs, java is objectively correct or at least making rational decisions for being like this.
Either you can't bring in the notion that 'hey, this number is larger than 12, therefore it cannot possibly be the month', or, you have to accept that whether a certain date format parsers properly depends on whether the day-of-month value is above or below 12. I would strongly advocate that you avoid a library that fails this rule like the plague. What possible point is there, in the end? "My app will parse your date correctly, but only for about 3/5ths of all dates?" So, given that you can't/should not take that into account, 1234567890, is that seconds-since-1970? milliseconds-since-1970? Is that the 12th of the 34th month of the year 5678, the 90th hour, and assumed zeroes for minutes, seconds, and millis? If a library guesses, that library is wrong, because you should not guess unless you're 95%+ sure.
The obvious and perennial "do not guess" example is, of course, 101112. Is that November 10th, 2012 (european style)? Is that October 11th, 2012 (American style), or is that November 12th, 2010 (ISO style)? These are all reasonable guesses and therefore guessing is just wrong here. Do. Not. Guess. Unless you're really sure. Given that this is a somewhat common way to enter dates, thus: Guessing at all costs is objectively silly (see above). Guessing only when it's pretty clear and erroring out otherwise is mostly useless, given that ambiguity is so easy to introduce.
The concept of guessing may be defensible but only with a lot more information. For example, if you give me the input '101112100000', there's no way it's correct to guess here. But if you also tell me that a human entered this input, and that human is clearly clued into, say, german locale, then I can see the need to be able to turn that into '10th of november 2012, 10 o'clock in the morning': Interpreting as seconds or millis since some epoch is precluded by the human factor, and the day-month-year order by locale.
You asked:
Are there some easy approach in Java?
This entire question is incorrect. The in Java part needs to be stripped from this question, and then the answer is a simple: No. There is no simple way to parse strings into date/times without a lot more information than just the input string. If another library says they can do that, they are lying, or at least, operating under a list of cultural and source assumptions as long as my leg, and you should not be using that library.
I don't know any standard library with this functionality, but you can always use DateTimeFormatter class and guess the format looping over a list of predefined formats, or using the ones provides by this class.
This is a typichal approximation of what you want to archive.
Here you can see and old implementation https://balusc.omnifaces.org/2007/09/dateutil.html
FTA (https://github.com/tsegall/fta) is designed to solve exactly this problem (among others). It currently parses thousands of formats and does not do it via a predefined set, so typically runs extremely quickly. In this example we explicitly set the DateResolutionMode, however, it will default to something intelligent based on the Locale. Here is an example:
import com.cobber.fta.dates.DateTimeParser;
import com.cobber.fta.dates.DateTimeParser.DateResolutionMode;
public abstract class Simple {
public static void main(final String[] args) {
final String[] samples = { "1970-01-01T00:00:00.00Z", "2021-09-20T17:27:00.000Z+02:00", "08/07/2021" };
final DateTimeParser dtp = new DateTimeParser().withDateResolutionMode(DateResolutionMode.MonthFirst).withLocale(Locale.ENGLISH);
for (final String sample : samples)
System.err.printf("Format is: '%s'%n", dtp.determineFormatString(sample));
}
}
Which will give the following output:
Format is: 'yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSX'
Format is: 'yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSX'
Format is: 'MM/dd/yyyy'
I am aware of
NumberFormat nf = NumberFormat.getInstance(Locale.getDefault());
But I want all the numbers shown in my app to be formatted according to the locale, thus I don't think it will be a good way to format them one by one using the above method.
So is there some global setting/variable/configuration that I have to change in order to do that?
Locale-aware formatting requires more than just translating e.g. month names from one language to another. In Java that's handled by separate classes apart from the ones that actually hold the values, e.g. NumberFormat, DateFormat. So there's no way around using them like you already do.
What you could try is to create some wrappers or convenience methods (like formatDate(Date)) to simplify things for you. Also put format strings into Android Resources (res/values).
Scanner.class give many useful tools to analyse numbers, like .hasNext_() and .next_() methods which can be triggered to specific traitments.
Is somewhere something like this, for Date : in a first time it would be to detect dates in a String, and adapts response to the format (mm/dd/yy|dd/mm/yy|yyyymmdd, are seconds inside, are letters inside, is four digits year, is negative ...) .
Edit for responses
Scanner give more than SimpleDateFormat it is able to return MatchResult and all is already done (and tested), Is such work is already done, or have I to developp it (re-invent wheel?)
Negative date for before JC periods
mm/dd/yy are from English, dd/mm/yy from other European, yyyymmdd from OS, so finding those differences gives different responses to apply.
Edit2
Calendar is a pretty tool, just know if somebody have already add on it the method above.
Take a look at Natty library. It's pretty cool. It can parse different kinds of dates including "today" "tommorow" "next Friday". Drawbacks is that you cannot really customize it. It has predefined rules for parsing dates and if you want to add/modify them you have to get source code and then compile your own version of natty.
This question already has an answer here:
Closed 11 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
generically parsing String to date
Following situation:
I need to detect if a String contains a DateTime/Timestamp. The problem is that those DateTimes come in various formats and granularity such as:
2011-09-12
12-09-2011
12.09.2011
2011-09-01-14:15
... and many many more variations
I don't need to understand the semantics (e.g. distinct between day or months) I just need to detect let's say 80% of the most common DateTime variations.
My first thought was using RegExp - which I'm far from being familiar with and also I would need to familiarize myselft with all variations in which DateTimes can come.
So my questions:
Does anybody know a canned RegExps to achieve this?
Is there maybe some Java library that could do this task?
Thanks!!
There is another question of same context, hope that link will help you: Dynamic regex for date time formats
you're going to struggle to find a generic match. For the day - month - year section you could possibly use a pattern like (\d{1,2}.){2}\d{4} which would match dates in format dd*mm*yyyy
DateFormat would be a better choice, I think. As John B suggested above, create a list of valid formats and try to match against each one.
Use Java's DateFormat.
You can set up as many formats as you want and iterate through them looking for a match. You will have to catch exceptions for the formats that don't parse and so this solution is not efficient but will work.
Edit per comment:
If you don't want to have exceptions due to performance the you would need to set up a list of regular expressions (one for each format you will support). Find the regex (if any) that matches your input and convert it to a date based on the matching format. What I would suggest would be to match a DateFormat to each regex and let the appropriate DateFormat do the work of parsing once you have identified the appropriate DateFormat. This would reduce the chance of errors in using the groups from the regex to produce the date. Personally, I don't know if this would actually be more efficient than try/catch so I would opt for the more straightforward mechanism (using DateFormat directly).
Is there any way in Java to guess the date format when it is not explicitly defined?
For example a user types in 11Mar09 or 11-09-2009 or 11/09/2009 or 11-09 what is the best way of parsing this to a Date object without either a bunch of try catch or raising an error?
I don't think you want to do this, especially based on your examples, but if you must, I think your best bet will be to use something like Apache's DateUtils in commons-lang:
String[] datePatterns = new String[] {
"ddMMMyy", // ex. 11Mar09
"dd-MM-yyyy", // ex. 11-09-2009
"dd/MM/yyyy", // ex. 11/09/2009
"dd-MM" // ex. 11-09
}
Date date = DateUtils.parseDate(stringDate, datePatterns);
Unfortunately dates like the fourth one above will be problematic - is "11/09" September 11th, November 9th, September 2011, November 2009, or something else?
My recommendation is don't. Use a date picker or an explicitely noted format. Guessing will lead to all kinds of problems, easily including, if the date is a critical one, litigation.
If you have to guess, provide some form of feedback that is non-ambiguous, something like a confirmation page that says "Your flight will be booked on the 9th of November, 2009. Is this correct?".
You could have a bunch of regular expressions and cycle through until you find a match. I think you could also have a bunch of DateFormats and cycle through them, catching exceptions on ones that failed.
The first avoids using exceptions for non-exceptional cases, the second is maybe better from a design point of view in that you're using a date parsing framework for what it was designed for. But overall, I don't think either approach is necessarily "best" or "worst" per se-- more a matter of personal preferences/beliefs.
As the domain of possible date-strings are infinite, I don't see how it could be possible to recognize them all. You can however pick a subset for pattern-matching.
You give no clues about your user-interface, but the best approach here would be to help the user input the date. For example with a pop-up calendar or just forcing a predefined format.