Convert string date to simple date format

Question

I am scraping a webpage that contains dates in this format: "8th November 2013". After I have returned the dates they are organized into an unordered array of strings. What I want to do then is somehow convert these strings to a simple date format like yyyy-MM-dd so I can order them and use them for interacting with the calendar?

Answer 1

How about something like this?

private String dateLongStringConvert(String dateLongString) {

    // split long date string into string array
    String[] dateArray = dateLongString.split(" ");

    // get day of month as an integer (strip out non numeric chars)
    int dayOfMonth = Integer.parseInt(dateArray[0].replaceAll("\\D+", ""));

    // Convert month string to number
    String month = "";
    switch (dateArray[1]) {
        case "January":
            month = "01";
        case "Feburary":
            month = "02";            
        case "March":
            month = "03";            
        case "April":
            month = "04";            
        case "May":
            month = "05";            
        case "June":
            month = "06";            
        case "July":
            month = "07";            
         case "August":
            month = "08";           
          case "September":
            month = "09";          
        case "October":
            month = "10";            
        case "Novemember":
            month = "11";
        case "December":
            month = "12";                
    }
    // return formated date string
    return dateArray[2] + "-" + month + "-" + String.format("%02d", dayOfMonth);
}

Answer 2

String inputDate = "8th November 2013";
inputDate = inputDate.replaceAll("([0-9])st|nd|rd|th|\\.", "$1"); // get rid of the th.
Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("d MMM y", Locale.ENGLISH).parse(inputDate); // parse input date
String outputDate = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd").format(date); // format to output date

Answer 3

Proper way to do such thing is to use a parser like Stanford Temporal Tagger and figure out dates from the text. A nice GUI( http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/sutime/process ) is provided by the team to evaluate the tool

Answer 4

to_char（'YYYY / MM / DD HH24：MI：ss'）