Date/Time: Parsing incoming Text with no year?

sherriff · July 20, 2012 11:42AM

I know that Date/Time handling is one of the most basic operations in Omniscope and that I should be able to do it by now having worked with Omniscope for over a year. However I am having the following problem:

Reading in a .txt file with comma separators, I get a Text field with date/time formatted as follows:

Tue 19 Jun 19:33

I am trying to format this into a recognised Date/time field using the Date format (input):
EEE dd MMM HH:mm
but I see no output? What am I doing wrong?

paola · July 20, 2012 12:06PM

Hi Chris,
I can't see anything wrong with your format. What sometimes happens on import from .txt or comma delimited files is that you are left with 'invisible characters', such as spaces before or after your values. Please try to 'clean' one or two values manually, to see if that is the case, and if it is you can use filtering to 'scrub' the rest.

steve · July 21, 2012 8:30AM

Chris,

I think the issue is that your dates don't have a year. Omniscope models dates as absolute moments in time. It IS possible to have an absent year part (which Omniscope handles by modelling internally as 1970), but not simultaneously having a day name; you need the year to be able to correlate the day name with the date.

You could strip the day name and that would work, except 29 Feb would be disallowed. Better to append the correct year value before converting to date, using an upstream Field Organiser operation or some other text manipulation operation.

Steve

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