How do you format the day of the month to say “11th”, “21st” or “23rd” (ordinal indicator)?

Question

I know this will give me the day of the month as a number (11, 21, 23):

SimpleDateFormat formatDayOfMonth = new Simple         


        

Answer 1

I can't be satisfied by the answers calling for a English-only solution based on manual formats. I've been looking for a proper solution for a while now and I finally found it.

You should be using RuleBasedNumberFormat. It works perfectly and it's respectful of the Locale.

Answer 2

There is a simpler and sure way of doing this. The function you'll need to use is getDateFromDateString(dateString); It basically removes the st/nd/rd/th off of a date string and simply parses it. You can change your SimpleDateFormat to anything and this will work.

public static final SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("d");
public static final Pattern p = Pattern.compile("([0-9]+)(st|nd|rd|th)");

private static Date getDateFromDateString(String dateString) throws ParseException {
     return sdf.parse(deleteOrdinal(dateString));
}

private static String deleteOrdinal(String dateString) {
    Matcher m = p.matcher(dateString);
    while (m.find()) {
        dateString = dateString.replaceAll(Matcher.quoteReplacement(m.group(0)), m.group(1));
    }
    return dateString;

}