Working with Integer parseInt(String)

So I'm working on a method to verify if two dates/times are in chronological order. I'm able to convert the yyyymmdd string into an int but when I use string addition to add on hhmm for the time it fails. Here's what I'm doing

[works]
int startDateTime = Integer.parseInt("yyyymmdd");

[fails]
int startDateTime = Integer.parseInt("yyyymmddhhmm");

Where:
yyyy = 4 digit year
mm = 2 digit month
dd = 2 digit day
hh = 2 digit hour
mm = 2 digit minute

Don't do this with ints, but use Date objects -- that's what it's for. You can convert the String to a Date using a SimpleDateFormat object. Then it's trivial to see how one Date compares with another.

Or compare the strings as strings! This is fine for either "yyyymmdd", "yyyymmddhhmm", "yyyymmdd:hhmmss.mmm" etc - provided a fixed number of digits is always present. That's the value of formats that proceed most significant to least significant like that.

Code:

---

                Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
                cal.set(2011, Calendar.APRIL, 10, 22, 00, 55);
                long startDateTime = cal.getTimeInMillis();

---

for more info
Calendar (Java 2 Platform SE v1.4.2)