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.