Parsing a date string without knowing the pattern

Hi guys.
Imagine this tool that works with files. At a certain point the tool reads a date from a certain file. The date may come in different flavours (read patterns), depending from file to file, I do not have control over there, so I'm stuck in this moment when I have to parse the date without knowing it's pattern. In one file it's 05-12-2005, in others it's 2007-11-03 12:50:00.
How do I proceed here?
Thanks.

This is going to be a problem.
The most obvious advice would be to create a list of known patterns and then try each of them with the String in question. One of the downsides of this is that you may get false positives, because for example you interpret a month as a day or vice-versa.
I think your starting place will be to figure out how many different date formats you actually have. If the answer truly is more than you can count or new ones are created all the time then you are going to have address that somehow because you simply can't have that. There's just no way to deal with a unlimited number of formats.
If you do get a list of formats then I would try what I first suggested but think of ways in which you can avoid false positives.

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Parsing a date string

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If I have the full qualified name (which I havent) then everything goes normal. I only have to load the "twoButtons" class and not the other (actionadapter class), so I dont think this is the point. In this case the twoButtons constructor constructs an object of the actionadapter class and everything goes well. The bad thing is though that I do not have the full qulified name :(
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reflectionTest is the class where the reflection stuff happens and the twoButttons class is defineClass() ed.
The problem is, only twoButtons class has the rights to call methods from the actionadapter class, the reflection class does not. BUT: I do not call the actionadapter methods from the reflection class. I call them only from the twoButtons class.
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Parsing a date string without knowing the pattern

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