Java: Data Science Made Easy

Validating dates

Many times our data validation is more complex than simply determining whether a piece of data is the correct type. When we want to verify that the data is a date for example, it is insufficient to simply verify that it is made up of integers. We may need to include hyphens and slashes, or ensure that the year is in two-digit or four-digit format.

 

To do this, we have created another simple method called validateDate. The method takes two String parameters, one to hold the date to validate and the other to hold the acceptable date format. We create an instance of the SimpleDateFormat class using the format specified in the parameter. Then we call the parse method to convert our String date to a Date object. Just as in our ...