apache date utils method parsedatestrictly methods do not work properly

java.time

I recommend that you use java.time for your date and time work. Apache DateUtils was useful once we only had the poorly designed Date and SimpleDateFormat classes to work with. We don’t need it anymore. For a long time now we haven’t needed it.

java.time behaves the way you expect out of the box.

    DateTimeFormatter dateFormatter
            = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("dd MMMM uuuu", Locale.ENGLISH);
    String dateString = "28 Sep 2018";
    LocalDate.parse(dateString, dateFormatter);

Result:

Exception in thread "main" java.time.format.DateTimeParseException: Text '28 Sep 2018' could not be parsed at index 3
    at java.base/java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter.parseResolved0(DateTimeFormatter.java:2046)
    at java.base/java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter.parse(DateTimeFormatter.java:1948)
    at java.base/java.time.LocalDate.parse(LocalDate.java:428)
    (etc.)

Link

Oracle tutorial: Date Time explaining how to use java.time.