Correctly Determine If Date String Is a Valid Date in That Format

Correctly determine if date string is a valid date in that format

You can use DateTime::createFromFormat() for this purpose:

function validateDate($date, $format = 'Y-m-d')
{
    $d = DateTime::createFromFormat($format, $date);
    // The Y ( 4 digits year ) returns TRUE for any integer with any number of digits so changing the comparison from == to === fixes the issue.
    return $d && $d->format($format) === $date;
}

^{[Function taken from this answer. Also on php.net. Originally written by Glavić.]}

---

Test cases:

var_dump(validateDate('2013-13-01'));  // false
var_dump(validateDate('20132-13-01')); // false
var_dump(validateDate('2013-11-32'));  // false
var_dump(validateDate('2012-2-25'));   // false
var_dump(validateDate('2013-12-01'));  // true
var_dump(validateDate('1970-12-01'));  // true
var_dump(validateDate('2012-02-29'));  // true
var_dump(validateDate('2012', 'Y'));   // true
var_dump(validateDate('12012', 'Y'));  // false

Demo!

Check if a string is a date value

Would Date.parse() suffice?

See its relative MDN Documentation page.

Date.parse returns a timestamp if string date is valid. Here are some use cases:

// /!\ from now (2021) date interpretation changes a lot depending on the browser
Date.parse('01 Jan 1901 00:00:00 GMT') // -2177452800000
Date.parse('01/01/2012') // 1325372400000
Date.parse('153') // NaN (firefox) -57338928561000 (chrome)
Date.parse('string') // NaN
Date.parse(1) // NaN (firefox) 978303600000 (chrome)
Date.parse(1000) // -30610224000000 from 1000 it seems to be treated as year
Date.parse(1000, 12, 12) // -30610224000000 but days and month are not taken in account like in new Date(year, month,day...)
Date.parse(new Date(1970, 1, 0)) // 2588400000
// update with edge cases from comments
Date.parse('4.3') // NaN (firefox) 986248800000 (chrome)
Date.parse('2013-02-31') // NaN (firefox) 1362268800000 (chrome)
Date.parse("My Name 8") // NaN (firefox) 996616800000 (chrome)

How do I validate a date string format in python?

>>> import datetime
>>> def validate(date_text):
        try:
            datetime.datetime.strptime(date_text, '%Y-%m-%d')
        except ValueError:
            raise ValueError("Incorrect data format, should be YYYY-MM-DD")

    
>>> validate('2003-12-23')
>>> validate('2003-12-32')

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#20>", line 1, in <module>
    validate('2003-12-32')
  File "<pyshell#18>", line 5, in validate
    raise ValueError("Incorrect data format, should be YYYY-MM-DD")
ValueError: Incorrect data format, should be YYYY-MM-DD

Check if date is a valid one

Was able to find the solution.
Since the date I am getting is in ISO format, only providing date to moment will validate it, no need to pass the dateFormat.

var date = moment("2016-10-19");

And then date.isValid() gives desired result.

Check if a string is a valid date using DateTime.TryParse

If you want your dates to conform a particular format or formats then use DateTime.TryParseExact otherwise that is the default behaviour of DateTime.TryParse

DateTime.TryParse

This method tries to ignore unrecognized data, if possible, and
fills in missing month, day, and year information with the current
date. If s contains only a date and no time, this method assumes the
time is 12:00 midnight. If s includes a date component with a
two-digit year, it is converted to a year in the current culture's
current calendar based on the value of the Calendar.TwoDigitYearMax
property. Any leading, inner, or trailing white space character in s
is ignored.

If you want to confirm against multiple formats then look at DateTime.TryParseExact Method (String, String[], IFormatProvider, DateTimeStyles, DateTime) overload. Example from the same link:

string[] formats= {"M/d/yyyy h:mm:ss tt", "M/d/yyyy h:mm tt", 
                   "MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss", "M/d/yyyy h:mm:ss", 
                   "M/d/yyyy hh:mm tt", "M/d/yyyy hh tt", 
                   "M/d/yyyy h:mm", "M/d/yyyy h:mm", 
                   "MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm", "M/dd/yyyy hh:mm"};
string[] dateStrings = {"5/1/2009 6:32 PM", "05/01/2009 6:32:05 PM", 
                        "5/1/2009 6:32:00", "05/01/2009 06:32", 
                        "05/01/2009 06:32:00 PM", "05/01/2009 06:32:00"}; 
DateTime dateValue;

foreach (string dateString in dateStrings)
{
   if (DateTime.TryParseExact(dateString, formats, 
                              new CultureInfo("en-US"), 
                              DateTimeStyles.None, 
                              out dateValue))
      Console.WriteLine("Converted '{0}' to {1}.", dateString, dateValue);
   else
      Console.WriteLine("Unable to convert '{0}' to a date.", dateString);
}
// The example displays the following output: 
//       Converted '5/1/2009 6:32 PM' to 5/1/2009 6:32:00 PM. 
//       Converted '05/01/2009 6:32:05 PM' to 5/1/2009 6:32:05 PM. 
//       Converted '5/1/2009 6:32:00' to 5/1/2009 6:32:00 AM. 
//       Converted '05/01/2009 06:32' to 5/1/2009 6:32:00 AM. 
//       Converted '05/01/2009 06:32:00 PM' to 5/1/2009 6:32:00 PM. 
//       Converted '05/01/2009 06:32:00' to 5/1/2009 6:32:00 AM.

Fastest way to tell if a string is a valid date

If you're really concerned about performance and your date format is really that simple, just pre-compute all the valid strings and hash them in memory. The format you have above only has ~ 8 million valid combinations up to 2050

---

EDIT by Slanec - reference implementation

This implementation depends on your specific dateformat. It could be adapted to any specific dateformat out there (just like my first answer, but a bit better).

It makes a set of all dates from 1900 to 2050 (stored as Strings - there are 54787 of them) and then compares the given dates with those stored.

Once the dates set is created, it's fast as hell. A quick microbenchmark showed an improvement by a factor of 10 over my first solution.

private static Set<String> dates = new HashSet<String>();
static {
    for (int year = 1900; year < 2050; year++) {
        for (int month = 1; month <= 12; month++) {
            for (int day = 1; day <= daysInMonth(year, month); day++) {
                StringBuilder date = new StringBuilder();
                date.append(String.format("%04d", year));
                date.append(String.format("%02d", month));
                date.append(String.format("%02d", day));
                dates.add(date.toString());
            }
        }
    }
}

public static boolean isValidDate2(String dateString) {
    return dates.contains(dateString);
}

P.S. It can be modified to use Set<Integer> or even Trove's TIntHashSet which reduces memory usage a lot (and therefore allows to use a much larger timespan), the performance then drops to a level just below my original solution.

Function to check if a string is a date

If that's your whole string, then just try parsing it:

if (DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d H:i:s', $myString) !== false) {
  // it's a date
}

How to check if a string is date?

Other person are also correct

This is your answer

import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;

public class date {
    public static boolean isValidDate(String inDate) {
        SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss:ms");
        dateFormat.setLenient(false);
        try {
            dateFormat.parse(inDate.trim());
        } catch (ParseException pe) {
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        System.out.println(isValidDate("20-01-2014"));
        System.out.println(isValidDate("11-04-2015 22:01:33:023"));

        System.out.println(isValidDate("32476347656435"));
    }
}

---

Related Topics