Date Confusion

[Crystal Bazil]

I am building a form that allows a user to select two dates(input boxes)in which to perform a search on. The users entered criteria will always be formatted to the MM/dd/yyyy format. However, in order for my query to work I need to format the date as follows: yyyy/MM/dd.

Otherwise I get the following exception:

  
Failed to connectjava.sql.SQLException: [Sybase][ODBC Driver][Adaptive Server Anywhere]
Restricted data type attribute violation: Cannot convert Sat Feb 01 00:00:00 CST 2003 to a timestamp

I have googled, search SDN forums and here but I haven't found the solution to my problem.

I have tried the following in my servlet(from examples online):

  
String startDate = (String)request.getParameter("start");
String endDate = (String)request.getParameter("end");
 
SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd");
 
 try {
      Date start = sdf.parse(startDate);
      Date end = sdf.parse(endDate);
      System.out.println( "yyyy/MM/dd " + sdf.format(start) );
      System.out.println("start" + start);
      System.out.println("end" + end);
 ...

What I dont understand is the out print lines I am logging which are as follows:

  
startDate    02/01/2003 // actual date from form
endDate      02/29/2003 // actual date from form
yyyy/MM/dd   0007/06/26
start        Sun Jun 26 00:00:00 CST 7
end          Thu Oct 24 00:00:00 CST 9

Which API should I be looking at? It seems like I need to use both java.text.SimpleDateFormat and java.text.DateFormat or perhaps one or the other. Why are my print outs so completely off my actual input dates? And is there a way to format a date string from MM/dd/yyyy to date yyyy/MM/dd?

I would appreciate any clarification on the above issues.

Thanks in advance - regards,
Crystal Bazil
[ December 09, 2005: Message edited by: Crystal Bazil ]

[Junilu Lacar]

Since your input is in MM/dd/yyyy format, the SimpleDateFormat object that parses that string should be created like so:

// input to parse is in MM/dd/yyyy format, not yyyy/MM/dd
SimpleDateFormat mmddyyyy = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
Date start = mmddyyyy.parse(inputStr);

// If you want to output as yyyy/MM/dd, you need another SimpleDateFormat:
SimpleDateFormat yyyymmdd = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd");
System.out.println(yyyymmdd.format(start));
[ December 09, 2005: Message edited by: Junilu Lacar ]

[Junilu Lacar]

Or you change the pattern by passing in a new format string to the applyPattern() method of the same SDF object.

The thing to remember is that parse() uses the pattern to determine what format the input (the String you are parsing) should be in. On the other hand, format() uses the pattern to determine the format of the output.

[Crystal Bazil]

Junilu - Your solution solved my issue. I appreciate the explanation and you time!

Crystal