JAVA Interview Questions

The following code shows how we can convert a string representation of date into java.util.Date object.

To convert a string of date we can use the help from java.text.SimpleDateFormat that extends java.text.DateFormat abstract class.

import java.text.DateFormat;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.util.Date;

public class StringToDate
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
      DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy");

      try
      {
          Date today = df.parse("20/12/2005");          
          System.out.println("Today = " + df.format(today));
      } catch (ParseException e)
      {
          e.printStackTrace();
      }
  }
}

And here is the result of our code:

Today = 20/12/2005

The example starts by creating an instance of SimpleDateFormat with "dd/MM/yyyy" format which mean that the date string is formatted in day-month-year sequence.

Finally using the parse(String source) method we can get the Date instance. Because parse method can throw java.text.ParseException exception if the supplied date is not in a valid format; we need to catch it.

Here are the list of defined patterns that can be used to format the date taken from the Java class documentation.