The DateFormat and its subclasses have methods called "parse" which parse Strings into Dates.
For internationalization, you need to get the proper instance of DateFormat, as follows.

DateFormat myFormat = DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.LONG, myLocale);
Date date = myFormat.parse(dateString);

Several points:

• You need to catch a ParseException



• DateFormat.LONG

  is a constant specifying the length and format of the date string; see the DateFormat API for more details.


• You can also use

  DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance

  or

  DateFormat.getTimeInstance

  depending on what you want your users to input.


• You can find out what format the string should have in internationalized form by casting the DateFormat object to a SimpleDateFormat object, then applying the

  toLocalizedPattern

  method.


• If you want more control over the format of the date string, you can use the SimpleDateFormat class, but then you need to handle more of the internationalization details yourself.