This repository contains some utilities used by the Stinky Teddy search engine (http://www.stinkyteddy.com). These are written in java. You'll need the Lucene core library for the org.apache.lucene.document.DateTools class. To build the jar, check out from git and do: ant The jar file will be in the dist directory. There is a utility called com.stinkyteddy.utils.StDateUtils that parses many common string representations of dates. To use: Date d = StDateUtils.parseDateString(string); where Date is java.util.Date.