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Commons Lang

Lang aims to provide:

• Comprehensive String handling utilities
• Enumerated types (pre JDK 1.5)
• Nested exceptions (pre JDK 1.4)
• Builders to create hashCode, equals, toString and compareTo methods
• Utilities for Object, Date and Numbers
  

The Javadoc of the latest version (2.1) is available.

The Javadoc of the CVS version (development) is available.

Development plan for 2.2

1. Bug fixes
2. StrTokenizer
3. StrBuilder
4. VariableFormatter/interpolator - 18962
   
   

Other ideas

1. Wiki Markup
   [21663|http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=21663] \[lang\] Add support in [ToStringStyle] for [DateFormat]. - *Grows quickly into commons-convert*

2. Wiki Markup
   [27643|http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=27643] \[lang\]\[patch\] [ClassUtils].newInstance method - *Seems unnecessary*

3. Wiki Markup
   [29149|http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=29149] \[lang\] [StringEscapeUtils].unescapeHtml() doesn't handle an empty entity - *Empty entity is in fact illegal HTML, so need to decide if we should ignore. Current behaviour seems acceptable as we're not in the work with bad HTML market.*

4. Wiki Markup
   [26659|http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26659] \[lang\] add method to [DateUtils] to get the distance between 2 dates - *Mainly replicated by [DurationFormatUtils], or non-obvious*

5. Wiki Markup
   [29692|http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=29692] \[lang\] String indentation feature request - *Needs design as a non-simple problem*

6. Wiki Markup
   [22172|http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22172] \[lang\] [DateUtils].parseCVS behavior parsing "h:mm z" - *Moved to sandbox*

7. Wiki Markup
   [26297|http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26297] \[lang\] [BitSetUtils] class, toIndexArray and fromIndexArray

8. 21333 Add TimeoutController - Class in HttpClient. Leaving til 3.0 as not much movement on it

9. Wiki Markup
   [30674|http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30674] Support [HttpClient]'s [DateParser] class - *This is basically a Date parseDate(String dateValue, String\[\] dateFormats) method.*

10. LocaleUtils - including toLocale(String,String)
11. CloneUtils - multiple ways to clone an object
    

Articles

This article http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/29392/0/page/6 discusses some of the interesting classes in Commons Lang with real world examples.