I am coding this with Groovy
I am currently trying to convert a string that I have to a date without having to do anything too tedious.
String theD
The first argument to parse() is the expected format. You have to change that to Date.parse("E MMM dd H:m:s z yyyy", testDate)
for it to work. (Note you don't need to create a new Date object, it's a static method)
If you don't know in advance what format, you'll have to find a special parsing library for that. In Ruby there's a library called Chronic, but I'm not aware of a Groovy equivalent. Edit: There is a Java port of the library called jChronic, you might want to check it out.