How to extract date elements and change a date value to a formatted string

This article provides information on how you can use Python in the Transform node to extract elements from a date data type field and format a field date field to a string field with a specified format.

You will notice that when you output a field that has been formatted as a date data type, the output takes the format YYYY-MM-DD. There are times you may want or must change the format of the output e.g. you want your report to show the date as MMM-YYYY or because a downstream application expects a specific format, such as DD-MMM-YYYY. 

The Python datetime module provides a set of operators to transform date date, time and datetime objects. You can read about the details of the datetime module in the Python documentation.

The datetime module is automatically imported when the Transform node is executed so you do not have to explicitly import the module within your scripts.

The strftime() operator enables you to create string representations of date, time and datetime objects, and apply a format code to specify the format of the string representation of the datetime object. The Python documentation for strftime() provides details of the format codes that can be applied. The format codes enable you to format a complete date in a particular string representation e.g. 02/28/2017, 28-02-2017 or 28 Feb 2017. You can also extract individual elements of a datetime object e.g. just the month as a padded representation of a decimal value: '02' or as a string value: 'February'.

The attached data flow provides some examples of the use of strftime().

Note, you will need a minimum of v3.1.5 to import the data flow.