java - SimpleDateFormat.parse() ignores the number of characters in pattern

Question

I'm trying to parse a date String which can have tree different formats. Even though the String should not match the second pattern it somehow does and therefore returns a wrong date.

That's my code:

import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

public class Start {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd.MM.yyyy");
        try{
            System.out.println(sdf.format(parseDate("2013-01-31")));
        } catch(ParseException ex){
            System.out.println("Unable to parse");
        }
    }

    public static Date parseDate(String dateString) throws ParseException{
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd.MM.yyyy");
        SimpleDateFormat sdf2 = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy");
        SimpleDateFormat sdf3 = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");

        Date parsedDate;
        try {
            parsedDate = sdf.parse(dateString);
        } catch (ParseException ex) {
            try{
                parsedDate = sdf2.parse(dateString);
            } catch (ParseException ex2){
                parsedDate = sdf3.parse(dateString);    
            }
        }
        return parsedDate;
    }
}

With the input 2013-01-31 I get the output 05.07.0036.

If I try to parse 31-01-2013 or 31.01.2013 I get 31.01.2013 as expected.

I recognized that the programm will give me exactly the same output if I set the patterns like this:

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("d.M.y");
SimpleDateFormat sdf2 = new SimpleDateFormat("d-M-y");
SimpleDateFormat sdf3 = new SimpleDateFormat("y-M-d");

Why does it ignore the number of chars in my pattern?

Answer 1

There are serious issues with SimpleDateFormat. The default lenient setting can produce garbage answers, and I cannot think of a case where lenient has any benefit. The lenient setting is not a reliable approach to produce reasonable interpretations of human entered date variations. This should never have been the default setting.

Use DateTimeFormatter instead if you can, see Ole V.V.'s answer. This newer approach is superior and produces thread safe and immutable instances. If you share a SimpleDateFormat instance between threads they can produce garbage results without errors or exceptions. Sadly my suggested implementation inherits this bad behavior.

Disabling lenient is only part of the solution. You can still end up with garbage results that are hard to catch in testing. See the comments in the code below for examples.

Here is an extension of SimpleDateFormat that forces strict pattern match. This should have been the default behavior for that class.

import java.text.DateFormatSymbols;
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.ParsePosition;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Locale;

/**
 * Extension of SimpleDateFormat that implements strict matching.
 * parse(text) will only return a Date if text exactly matches the
 * pattern. 
 * 
 * This is needed because SimpleDateFormat does not enforce strict 
 * matching. First there is the lenient setting, which is true
 * by default. This allows text that does not match the pattern and
 * garbage to be interpreted as valid date/time information. For example,
 * parsing "2010-09-01" using the format "yyyyMMdd" yields the date 
 * 2009/12/09! Is this bizarre interpretation the ninth day of the  
 * zeroth month of 2010? If you are dealing with inputs that are not 
 * strictly formatted, you WILL get bad results. You can override lenient  
 * with setLenient(false), but this strangeness should not be the default. 
 *
 * Second, setLenient(false) still does not strictly interpret the pattern. 
 * For example "2010/01/5" will match "yyyy/MM/dd". And data disagreement like 
 * "1999/2011" for the pattern "yyyy/yyyy" is tolerated (yielding 2011). 
 *
 * Third, setLenient(false) still allows garbage after the pattern match. 
 * For example: "20100901" and "20100901andGarbage" will both match "yyyyMMdd". 
 * 
 * This class restricts this undesirable behavior, and makes parse() and 
 * format() functional inverses, which is what you would expect. Thus
 * text.equals(format(parse(text))) when parse returns a non-null result.
 * 
 * @author zobell
 *
 */
public class StrictSimpleDateFormat extends SimpleDateFormat {

    protected boolean strict = true;

    public StrictSimpleDateFormat() {
        super();
        setStrict(true);
    }

    public StrictSimpleDateFormat(String pattern) {
        super(pattern);
        setStrict(true);
    }

    public StrictSimpleDateFormat(String pattern, DateFormatSymbols formatSymbols) {
        super(pattern, formatSymbols);
        setStrict(true);
    }

    public StrictSimpleDateFormat(String pattern, Locale locale) {
        super(pattern, locale);
        setStrict(true);
    }

    /**
     * Set the strict setting. If strict == true (the default)
     * then parsing requires an exact match to the pattern. Setting
     * strict = false will tolerate text after the pattern match. 
     * @param strict
     */
    public void setStrict(boolean strict) {
        this.strict = strict;
        // strict with lenient does not make sense. Really lenient does
        // not make sense in any case.
        if (strict)
            setLenient(false); 
    }

    public boolean getStrict() {
        return strict;
    }

    /**
     * Parse text to a Date. Exact match of the pattern is required.
     * Parse and format are now inverse functions, so this is
     * required to be true for valid text date information:
     * text.equals(format(parse(text))
     * @param text
     * @param pos
     * @return
     */
    @Override
    public Date parse(String text, ParsePosition pos) {
        Date d = super.parse(text, pos);
        if (strict && d != null) {
           String format = this.format(d);
           if (pos.getIndex() + format.length() != text.length() ||
                 !text.endsWith(format)) {
              d = null; // Not exact match
           }
        }
        return d;
    }
}