How to check if a certain date is passed

Question

I have a string of the form "mm/yyyy" and I want to compare it against the date of the local system.

I have thought of either using a conversion table between my month and the MONTH field in Calendar, something like:

    Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
    String date = "07/2014";
    String month = date.subString(0, 2);
    int monthToCompare;
    if (month.equals("01"))
      monthToCompare = cal.JANUARY;
    if (month.equals("02"))
      monthToCompare = cal.FEBRUARY;
    ...

And then comparing manually with an if. I don't like it because I think is way too long for such a simple operation.

The other option I've thought of is getting the current Date() and using the before() method. That would mean translating my date to the Date format, but the easy methods to do it are deprecated, I must specify the number of milliseconds and I do not know how to easily do that (taking into consideration leap years, calendar corrections and so on since 1970).

Answer 1

Using @Mifmif answer I finally solved the problem with:

if (new SimpleDateFormat("MM/yyyy").parse(date).before(new Date())) {
    ...
}