Python has a very handy package that can parse nearly any unambiguous date and provides helpful error messages on a parse failure, python-dateutil. Comparison to the SimpleDateFormat class is not favorable - AFAICT SimpleDateFormat can only handle one exact date format and the error messages have no granularity. I've looked through the Joda API but it appears Joda is the same way - only one explicit format can be parsed at a time. Is there any package or library that reproduces the python-dateutil behavior? Or am I missing something WRT Joda/SimpleDateFormat?