Parsing a time field with SimpleDateFormat

Question

Our users can not key in a military time, they must key in a time with the ampm designation. We allow a for am, p for pm, m for midnight and n for noon. (Don't ask-I guess they don't understand 12:00pm or 12:00am so they specify 12:00m for midnight and 12:00n for noon.)
I want to use the parse function, with lenient set to false to validate that they keyed a valid date. This works fine when they key a or p behind the date. If they key m or n, it gives an error. I tried using DateFormatSymbols to allow a,p,m or n for the AmPmStrings. This works fine if lenient is set to true. With lenient set to false, it still gives me an invalid date. I guess it is not recognizing my DateFormatSymbol.
Not sure if I am going about this the wrong way or if there is an easier way to validate the time. I just thought the parse would be a cleaner way then to substring out the hours and minutes, then validate that they are valid numbers.
Below is the code I was using. Can anyone explain why this won't work?
DateFormatSymbols symbols = new DateFormatSymbols();
     String[] ampm = new String[4];
     ampm[0] = new String("A");
     ampm[1] = new String("P");
     ampm[2] = new String("M");
     ampm[3] = new String("N");
     symbols.setAmPmStrings(ampm);
     SimpleDateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("hhmma", symbols);
df.setLenient(false);
try
parsedTime = df.parse(time.toUpperCase());
return true;
catch (ParseException e)
errorMessages.add("Invalid Date.");
return false;
}

Answer 1

Well, this isn't gonna help you, but-
I can't say unequivocally(sp) that this is the case, but after a bit of poking about, it appears that the DateFormatSymbols.setAmPmStrings method ignores everything but the first two entries in the string. That is, if you use
ampm[0] = new String("M");
ampm[1] = new String("N");
ampm[2] = new String("A");
ampm[3] = new String("P");You will be able to parse M's and N's, but not A's and P's.
Not sure if that helps you, but there you go.
Lee