There’s no doubt that Joda time is now the defacto date time library for java. And a well written library it is. You get almost everything you can ever want to do with Date objects and best of all, almost all operations are dummy-proof. By dummy proof I mean that programmers making silly mistakes can’t really screw it up.
I recently had to parse a String into a LocalDate object using Joda time. I couldn’t find a parser in the docs or the very useful userguide but I knew it had to be possible, no one could overlook such a widely used operation. So I went in search of a parse.
It turns out that the parser and the formatter are one and the same thing in joda time, except with different methods ofcourse. Here’s how you construct a parser to parse a String in YYYYMMDD format :
DateTimeFormatter inputFormatter = new DateTimeFormatterBuilder().appendYear(4, 4).appendMonthOfYear(2)
.appendDayOfMonth(2).toFormatter();