This is a utility to convert a string value to one of the primitive type values. It is useful in Java reflection code where the value comes in as a string (e.g., from XML parsing), and the type of the value cannot be decided until runtime. import java.util.*; import java.lang.reflect.*;... Note: This method can be extended to convert string to more complex types by writing a converter for the destination type. For example, to convert string to date: public class DateConverter { public static ... Usage: Date d = (Date) ConvertUtil.convert("10/12/2010", ...

The String.format() method provides versatile formatting capabilities. This tutorial tries to present these capabilities in a accessible manner. The format string A format string can contain zero, one, or more format specifiers . The general form of a format specifier is: %[argument_index$] [flags] [width] [.precision]co... where things in square brackets are optional, and conversion is a character indicating the conversion to be applied to the corresponding variable value. The only required characters in the format specifier is the percent sign % and the conversion character. A simple example: public static void simpleFormat() { System.out... The Argument index The argument index is specified by a number, terminated by the dollar sign $ . The same argument may be repeated multiple times in a format string. Unindexed...

This one is even more weird: it worked on Windows but failed on Linux, using default tools JDK1.6.0_20 on both. The exception thrown was: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid conversion fro... And the stack trace: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid conversion fro... This was the XSL used: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xs... The problem was , DateUtil.java had two getDate methods, one taking long parameter, the other taking a String parameter. And Java's XSLT get confused about which one to use: import java.util.Date; import java.text.SimpleD...