parsing a time field with SimpleDateFormat
Our users can not key in a military time, they must key in a time with the ampm designation. We allow a for am, p for pm, m for midnight and n for noon. (Don't ask-I guess they don't understand 12:00pm or 12:00am so they specify 12:00m for midnight and 12:00n for noon.)
I want to use the parse function, with lenient set to false to validate that they keyed a valid date. This works fine when they key a or p behind the date. If they key m or n, it gives an error. I tried using DateFormatSymbols to allow a,p,m or n for the AmPmStrings. This works fine if lenient is set to true. With lenient set to false, it still gives me an invalid date. I guess it is not recognizing my DateFormatSymbol.
Not sure if I am going about this the wrong way or if there is an easier way to validate the time. I just thought the parse would be a cleaner way then to substring out the hours and minutes, then validate that they are valid numbers.
Below is the code I was using. Can anyone explain why this won't work?
DateFormatSymbols symbols = new DateFormatSymbols();
String[] ampm = new String[4];
ampm[0] = new String("A");
ampm[1] = new String("P");
ampm[2] = new String("M");
ampm[3] = new String("N");
symbols.setAmPmStrings(ampm);
SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("hhmma", symbols);
df.setLenient(false);
try
{
parsedTime = df.parse(time.toUpperCase());
return true;
}
catch (ParseException e)
{
errorMessages.add("Invalid Date.");
return false;
}
