Splitting string having special character, white space and comma

Question

I have string in below format

0030k000002HsSaAAK#2009-06-21 00:00:00,0030k000002HpvTAAS#2003-05-08 00:00:00,0030k000002uxiyAAA#2011-06-29 00:00:00,

I have to separate out only dates from this like 2009-06-21, 2003-05-08 and 2011-06-29 and then I have to do comparison of the dates and find out the latest date. Can anyone help me in splitting this.

Here's my current code:

set<String> dateSet = new set<String>();
String s='0030k000002HsSaAAK#2009-06-21 00:00:00,0030k000002HpvTAAS#2003-05-08 00:00:00,0030k000002uxiyAAA#2011-06-29 00:00:00,';
List<String> splitstr = new List<String>();
splitstr = s.split('[,]{1}[\\s]?');
system.debug('splitstr'+splitstr[0]);

Answer 1

You can do this using regex:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile('(\\d{4}-\\d{2}-\\d{2})+');
Matcher pm = p.matcher('0030k000002HsSaAAK#2009-06-21 00:00:00,0030k000002HpvTAAS#2003-05-08 00:00:00,0030k000002uxiyAAA#2011-06-29 00:00:00,');

List<String> dates = new List<String>();
if(pm.find()) {
   do{
       dates.add(pm.group());
   }while(pm.find());
}
System.debug(dates);

OUTPUT

(2009-06-21, 2003-05-08, 2011-06-29)

Answer 2

If you can guarantee that the format will always be like this:

<id>#<date><space>

then you can get the string, use the split method from the String class, and then iterate the strings and get the date using the substring method, like this:

List<String> dates = new List<String>();
Set<String> data = myString.split(' ');
for (String s : data) {
    dates.add(s.substring(20, 30));
}

Note that with this example you will need to parse the date if you want to work with the Date class, but that can be easily achieved inside the for loop.