How to validate date string in java

Question

How to test a valid date string, assuming acceptable format is "YYYY-MM-DD"? (Y year, M month, D day)

I've tried DateFormat.parse(date_string) but it parses things like "2012-542-86".

Answer 1

The format should be yyyy-MM-dd

Have a look at valid formats at SimpleDateFormat API documentation .

Answer 2

As default, the parsing is lenient , which means it uses heuristics to parse non-exact matches.

You need to turn this off using #setLenient(false) to make it reject all non-matching formats.