text: I am coding this with Groovy
  I am currently trying to convert a string that I have to a date without having to do anything too tedious.
  String theDate = "28/09/2010 16:02:43";
  def newdate = new Date().parse("d/M/yyyy H:m:s", theDate)
  Tue Aug 10 16:02:43 PST 2010
  String testDate = "Tue Aug 10 16:02:43 PST 2010"
  def newerdate = new Date().parse("d/M/yyyy H:m:s", testDate)
  The first argument to parse() is the expected format. You have to change that to
  Date.parse("E MMM dd H:m:s z yyyy", testDate) for it to work. (Note you don't need to create a new Date object, it's a static method)
  If you don't know in advance what format, you'll have to find a special parsing library for that. In Ruby there's a library called Chronic, but I'm not aware of a Groovy equivalent. Edit: There is a Java port of the library called jChronic, you might want to check it out.