Parsing dates with dashes

Question

Hi everyone,
I have a problem parsing a date that contains dashes, I searched all over the net for any word on this problem, but I couldn't find any.
SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy");
System.out.println(format.parse("24-09-1976"));
java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "24-09-1976"
     at java.text.DateFormat.parse(DateFormat.java:319)
     at test.TestMisc.testDateParse(TestMisc.java:12)
     at test.TestMisc.main(TestMisc.java:21)
Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Woow. I must say I'm over-whelmed by the fast response. Thanks to everyone.
In fact, my locale is an Arabic one, and I tried it while setting the locale to US and it worked, but that's completely rediculous. The locale specific stuff related to SimpleDateFormat should only be the textual parts, like month names and stuff like that, but what does locale have to do with parsing numberical dates?
I think one fast solution that I can do now is get my date parsing method to use a US locale, but does any one know of a method to tell my locale to behave properly and parse the date as it should?
My JDK is 1.3.1_11, do you guys think this might be a bug with the JDK?
I also tried
System.out.println(Calendar.getInstance() instanceof GregorianCalendar);
The result was "true", which means that the calendar is a gregorian one, so that eliminates the possiblity that the problem is caused due to a lunar calendar.