Thread-safe Date Parser

Question

I'm looking for a thread-safe replacement for SimpleDateFormat. parseObject on good old FastDateFormat isn't implemented and just throws an error. Any ideas? I don't need anything fancy, just thread-safety and the ability to handle this pattern: "yyyy-MM-dd".

Answer 1

If at all possible, use Joda Time. Its date/time parsers are thread-safe, and it's generally a much nicer API than Date/Calendar.

You can use just its parsers and then convert the return values to Date, but personally I would recommend using the whole library instead.

Answer 2

As outlined in this post you can either synchronise, use thread locals or Joda-Time.

For example, using ThreadLocals:

public class DateFormatTest {

  private static final ThreadLocal<DateFormat> df
                 = new ThreadLocal<DateFormat>(){
    @Override
    protected DateFormat initialValue() {
        return new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd");
    }
  };

  public Date convert(String source)
                     throws ParseException{
    Date d = df.get().parse(source);
    return d;
  }
}

Answer 3

java.time

The java.time types are thread-safe. The java.time API (the modern Date-Time API^*) has been there since March 2014 as part of Java SE 8 standard library.

Quoted below is a notice from the home page of Joda-Time:

Note that from Java SE 8 onwards, users are asked to migrate to java.time (JSR-310) - a core part of the JDK which replaces this project.

Demo:

import java.time.LocalDate;

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String strDate = "2021-06-13";
        LocalDate date = LocalDate.parse(strDate);
        System.out.println(date);
    }
}

Output:

2021-06-13

ONLINE DEMO

The modern Date-Time API is based on ISO 8601 and does not require using a DateTimeFormatter object explicitly as long as the Date-Time string conforms to the ISO 8601 standards. You might have noticed that I have not used a parsing type (DateTimeFormatter) in the above code because yyyy-MM-dd is also the ISO 8601 pattern for a date.

Learn more about the modern Date-Time API from Trail: Date Time.

---

^{* For any reason, if you have to stick to Java 6 or Java 7, you can use ThreeTen-Backport which backports most of the java.time functionality to Java 6 & 7. If you are working for an Android project and your Android API level is still not compliant with Java-8, check Java 8+ APIs available through desugaring and How to use ThreeTenABP in Android Project.}

Answer 4

Why not to put the call of SimpleDateFormat.parseObject() into your own synchronized block?