I know this question is asked quite a bit, and obviously you can't parse any arbitrary date. However, I find that the python-dateutil library is able to parse every date I throw at it, all while requiring absolutely zero effort in figuring out a date format string. Joda time is always sold as being a great Java date parser, but it still requires you to decide what format your date is in before you pick a Format (or create your own). You can't just call DateFormatter.parse(mydate) and magically get a Date object back.
For example, the date "Wed Mar 04 05:09:06 GMT-06:00 2009" is properly parsed with python-dateutil:
import dateutil.parser
print dateutil.parser.parse('Wed Mar 04 05:09:06 GMT-06:00 2009')
but the following Joda time call doesn't work:
String date = "Wed Mar 04 05:09:06 GMT-06:00 2009";
DateTimeFormatter fmt = ISODateTimeFormat.dateTime();
DateTime dt = fmt.parseDateTime(date);
System.out.println(date);
And creating your own DateTimeFormatter defeats the purpose, since that seems to be the same as using SimpleDateFormatter with the correct format string.
Is there a comparable way to parse a date in Java, like python-dateutil? I don't care about errors, I just want it to mostly perfect.