Re: [icu-support] [ICU] DateTime parsing questions

[<yos...@us...>]

> One of the questions I have is about parsing. Do I need to tell ICU 
> which is the format of the input string so that it can detect the 
> year, month and day?
> 
> If so, how can I specify this for "20/12/2012"?

Use SimpleDateFormat with pattern "d/M/y" (or "dd/MM/yyyy" - in this 
specific case, width of fields does not matter) for this case.


> According to http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/datetime, 
> I should know the locale and the SHORT, MEDIUM, LONG or FULL 
> property about the input date string, isn't it? Is that enough?

In general, parsing text representation of date or time is error prone.

Many folks prefer to use UI widgets to take date/time inputs.
Some other folks explicitly specify pattern along with text field (such as 
"yyyy/mm/dd").
I know there are some folks trying to support direct text inputs by using 
multiple ICU SimpleDateFormat instances with possible patterns in priority 
order. ICU implementation provides a certain level of leniency in parsing, 
but a single SimpleDateFormat instance is usually not sufficient to handle 
all reasonable variations.

-Yoshito