Extracting dates from text in Java

Question

Is it possible to extract dates from a string in Java?

I have 500+ string with different data. In them, there can be:
"... period from 08.23.2011 - 09.05.2011..."
and also:
"...period ends 06.09.2011...".

It's not certain that the above string are there, but they can be.

Is it possible to extract the 3 dates and get them in Date format?

Answer 1

In essence regex is the answer for recognition, but there are lots and lots of ways to express dates and time periods, so if you want a good solution, you probably want to use an existing well-tuned set of regex. There's then a second phase of interpretation, which needs more flexibility than what JodaTime will parse out of the box. So for a robust solution, you probably want to use one of the systems that have been built in the natural language processing community, such as SUTime, HeidelTime or GUTime.