title: Get year, month and day from parsed date
body: <p>I have the following code to validate a date given a date format:</p>
  
  <pre><code>val df = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
  df.setLenient(false);
  
  try {
     val date = df.parse("11/13/2014");
  }
  catch {
    case pe: ParseException =&gt; println("date error")
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now, what I need is to obtain the year, month and day in three variables. What is the best way to achieve this? Note that I need a solution based on performance as I need to validate/convert thousands of dates.</p>