How to sanity check a date in Java [closed]

Answer 1

With 'legacy' date format, we can format the result and compare it back to the source.

    public boolean isValidFormat(String source, String pattern) {
    SimpleDateFormat sd = new SimpleDateFormat(pattern);
    sd.setLenient(false);
    try {
        Date date = sd.parse(source);
        return date != null && sd.format(date).equals(source);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        return false;
    }
}

This execerpt says 'false' to source=01.01.04 with pattern '01.01.2004'