Parsing a date’s ordinal indicator ( st, nd, rd, th ) in a date-time string

by

Java’s SimpleDateFormat doesn’t support an ordinal suffix, but the ordinal suffix is just eye candy – it is redundant and can easily be removed to allow a straightforward parse:

Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd yyyy hh:mma")
    .parse(str.replaceAll("(?<=\\d)(st|nd|rd|th)", ""));

The replace regex is so simple because those sequences won’t appear anywhere else in a valid date.

To handle any language that appends any length of ordinal indicator characters from any language as a suffix:

Date date = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd yyyy hh:mma")
    .parse(str.replaceAll("(?<=\\d)(?=\\D* \\d+ )\\p{L}+", ""));

Some languages, eg Mandarin, prepend their ordinal indicator, but that could be handled too using an alternation – left as an exercise for the reader 🙂

More Related Contents:

  1. String-Date conversion with nanoseconds
  2. java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "Augu 16, 1979" [duplicate]
  3. Y returns 2012 while y returns 2011 in SimpleDateFormat
  4. Illegal pattern character ‘T’ when parsing a date string to java.util.Date
  5. What is this date format? 2011-08-12T20:17:46.384Z
  6. Why is Java’s SimpleDateFormat not thread-safe? [duplicate]
  7. java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date
  8. SimpleDateFormat producing wrong date time when parsing “YYYY-MM-dd HH:mm”
  9. Java SimpleDateFormat always returning January for Month
  10. Parsing ISO 8601 date format like 2015-06-27T13:16:37.363Z in Java [duplicate]
  11. Changing String date format
  12. Unable to parse DateTime-string with AM/PM marker
  13. Java Date year calculation is off by year for two days
  14. Get yesterday’s date using Date [duplicate]
  15. How to parse month full form string using DateFormat in Java?
  16. SimpleDateFormat parse loses timezone [duplicate]
  17. SimpleDateFormat parse(string str) doesn’t throw an exception when str = 2011/12/12aaaaaaaaa?
  18. Java Convert GMT/UTC to Local time doesn’t work as expected
  19. How to convert date in to yyyy-MM-dd Format?
  20. Displaying AM and PM in lower case after date formatting
  21. How to convert HH:mm:ss.SSS to milliseconds?
  22. Why can’t this SimpleDateFormat parse this date string?
  23. SimpleDateFormat giving wrong date instead of error
  24. DateFormat parse – not return date in UTC
  25. Java SimpleDateFormat Timezone offset with minute separated by colon
  26. Getting wrong month when using SimpleDateFormat.parse
  27. Simple Date format returns Wrong date intermittently [duplicate]
  28. Why is the month changed to 50 after I added 10 minutes?
  29. java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: “01:19 PM”
  30. Is SimpleDateFormat in Java work incorrect or I did any mistake? See code sample [duplicate]

Leave a Comment