How to check if a string contains a date in Java?

Question

How do I check if a string contains a date of this form:

Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 7:36pm EST

The data I\'m working with contains

Answer 1

You could test it using the simpleDateFormat parse method. to continue your code, surround the code with a try/catch, for instance:

try {
    Date date = format.parse(string);
} catch (ParseException e) {
        //the string is not applicable to the date format
}

If the date is a string which follows the format guidelines in the SimpleDateFormat, the Date will be created successfully.