parse-as-date.md

Parse as Date

The PARSE-AS-DATE directive is for parsing dates using natural language processing.

Syntax

parse-as-date <column> [<time-zone>]

Usage Notes

The PARSE-AS-DATE directive will apply standard language recognition and translation techniques to produce a list of corresponding dates with optional parse and syntax information.

It recognizes dates described in many ways, including formal dates (02/28/1979), relaxed dates (oct 1st), relative dates (the day before next thursday), and even date alternatives (next wed or thurs).

This directive will also search for date components within a larger block of text, detect their structure, and create dates.

It will create a new column using the syntax <column>_1 containing the results of parsing.

If <time-zone> is not provided, UTC is used as the timezone.

Examples

Using this record as an example:

{
  "create_date": "now",
}

Applying this directive:

parse-as-date create_date US/Eastern

would result in this record (the actual results depending on when this was run):

{
  "create_date": "now",
  "create_date_1": "Mon May 01 14:13:35 EDT 2017"
}