Groovy String to Date

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.

Try this:

def date = Date.parse("E MMM dd H:m:s z yyyy", dateStr)

Here are the patterns to format the dates