Convert Android's date Strings to date objects

Question

In Android, the date of every event (such as birthdays and anniversaries) is saved in String format, e.g. "2011-12-24".

This is at least the case for my phone. Some other phones may perhaps store these dates in other formats if they have a calendar different from the Gregorian one.

Even for phones with the Gregorian calendar set, there are date Strings with hours and minutes and without. I get such a date String when I query the contacts table for an event:

cursor.getString(cursor.getColumnIndex(ContactsContract.CommonDataKinds.Event.ST‌​ART_DATE))

This results in (for example):

"2011-12-14" or "2011-12-24T00:00:00Z"

You can see that there are lots of different possible formats. In order to calculate with dates, I need to convert them from String to Date objects, needn't I?

How can I do this?

PS: I know there is a parse function for java date objects:

DateFormat myDateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yy");
Date tempDate = myDateFormat.parse("24/12/2011");

But in Android, I don't know which format I'll be confronted with, do I?

Answer 1

Android works with date objects. Anytime you need to parse a date from string is because that date has been serialized, most likely in a file. In that case, you would know the format that was used. Date object is used in preferences, date object is used almost everywhere I can think of that relates to shared services, activites, etc. This means, there's almost never a need to parse string from date unless, like I said you're working with serialized source, reading it from a web service etc. If you can tell us your scenario, you might get more specific answer.

You can get the currently set date format like this:

DateFormat dateFormat = android.text.format.DateFormat.getDateFormat(getApplicationContext());