validation - How to sanity check a date in Java

Question

I find it curious that the most obvious way to create Date objects in Java has been deprecated and appears to have been "substituted" with a not so obvious to use lenient calendar.

How do you check that a date, given as a combination of day, month, and year, is a valid date?

For instance, 2008-02-31 (as in yyyy-mm-dd) would be an invalid date.

Answer 1

Key is df.setLenient(false);. This is more than enough for simple cases. If you are looking for a more robust (I doubt) and/or alternate libraries like joda-time then look at the answer by the user "tardate"

final static String DATE_FORMAT = "dd-MM-yyyy";

public static boolean isDateValid(String date) 
{
        try {
            DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT);
            df.setLenient(false);
            df.parse(date);
            return true;
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            return false;
        }
}