Set a String variable to a Date object in java

Question

I want to set a hand written String as the date for a Date object. What I'm trying to say is that I want to do is this:

String date= [date string here!!!];
Date mydate = new Date(date);

Something like that. The reason I want to do this is because I want my network to have standard Date and Time because since I run them from the same machine the time is being taken from the same clock and it gets different time every time. So I want to get that time and also add 1-2 seconds in the end so I can test my nodes with different times.

Answer 1

Java is strongly typed language. You cannot assign string to Date. However you can (and should) parse string into date. For example you can use SimpleDateFormat class like the following:

SimpleDateFormat fmt = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
Date date = fmt.parse("2013-05-06");

Answer 2

you'll want to use dateformatter

DateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yy");
Date date = formatter.parse("01/29/02");