PHP's "strtotime" vs JAVA's ... nothing

PHP”s “strtotime” function is one of the coolest core functions of the language. I never really noticed how great it was until today.

At my company, we import date formats from customers and need to store them in MySQL format. (“Y-m-d h:m:s”). In PHP, you can pass strtotime just about anything and – with the help of the date function – convert that wiley timestamp to what you want.

Consider the following time formats:

• 2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00 (ISO 8601)
• Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200 (RFC 2822)
• Monday, January 1st
• tomorrow
• -1 week 2 days 4 hours 2 seconds

class Foo
  def bar
    do_something()
  end
end

Let”s convert these to MySQL timestamps with PHP:

echo date("Y-m-d h:m:s", strtotime("2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00"));
echo date("Y-m-d h:m:s", strtotime("Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200"));
echo date("Y-m-d h:m:s", strtotime("Monday, January 1st"));
echo date("Y-m-d h:m:s", strtotime("tomorrow"));
echo date("Y-m-d h:m:s", strtotime("-1 week 2 days 4 hours 2 seconds"));

This automagically outputs:

2004-02-12 07:02:21
2000-12-21 06:12:07
2009-01-01 12:01:00
2009-02-12 12:02:00
2009-02-06 09:02:41

I remember the first time I can across strtotime and thought “wow - it will take in just about any format.” Clearly, there are some limits (I can”t enter “orange” and get a date back) – but needless to say, the function is simple and powerful.

Back to today at work.

A developer (we’ve recently moved to being an all-Java shop) tells me he has to write a custom date parser for ingesting and converting partner’s date formats. And every time we see a new date format, he has to add to his parser (then we have to build it, QA it, release it).

Poppy cock, I say! Isn”t there something in Java like strtotime? Turns out? No.

I did my googling, nothing. Then I turned to Twitter. Watch as we go from “But you can do that in Java!” to “oh, well, you”d have to be expecting a certain date format” quicker than you can say “ISO 8601.”

• Java Friend #1: “you can do that simply: String time = “12:31:24”; DateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(“hh:mm:ss”); String result = sdf.parse(time).toString();”
• Java Friend #2: “Won”t SimpleDateFormat.parse do what you need?”
• Me, to both: “Thanks for the suggestions. All the sample code I see is massive compared to the one-liner ‘strtotime.’ Sigh. Ah well.”
• Java Friend #1 replies : “a one liner, but not as short as strtotime: System.out.println(new SimpleDateFormat(“EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss z”).parse(t));””
• I direct message #1: “Will SimpleDateFormat accept multiple input date formats: ISO 8601, RFC 2822, MySQL Timestamp/Datestamp, etc.?”
• His reply: “you need to know the date format coming into SimpleDateTime. What format is it?”
• Me: “There’s the rub. Could be ISO 8601, RFC 2822, MySQL Timestamp/Datestamp, etc. Was hoping to not have to write for each possible”
• Him: “you’ll need to do something about the type of date strings you operating on to make an error free conversion”

<slaps forehead>

And there’s the problem – I don’t want to have to build in a switch for every known date format. If partner XYZ wants to enter a non-standard format (“-1 week 2 days 4 hours 2 seconds”?), we shouldn’t need to refactor the code to parse this.

Now. A disclaimer. I am not a JAVA programmer. I consider myself an intermediate PHP programmer. Programming is not my job nor is it my dream to become a full-time developer.

However, I’ve done my googleing, and I’ve asked 4 different JAVA experts who all agree it can’t be done as cleanly as strototime.

That being said? Booooo to you Java. Boooooo.