Parsing dates is important because dates are often represented in different formats and need to be converted into a standardized format for various purposes. Parsing dates allows the extraction and manipulation of date information to perform data analysis, calculations and comparisons. In applications that involve date inputs, users may enter dates in different formats, such as “MM/DD/YYYY” or “YYYY-MM-DD”. By parsing the dates, Alteryx can convert dates into a consistent format for storage and further processing.
For instance, the user input for date time are as follows (in ‘TIMESTAMP’ and ‘Time_Now’ columns) and we want to parse the dates into a standardized format. We will then find the difference between the two dates and separate the output into days, hours, minutes and seconds.
These are the steps in Alteryx:
- Connect the formula tool to the input. Here’s a list of DateTime functions from the Alteryx website as a reference (https://help.alteryx.com/20231/designer/datetime-functions). To parse the dates, I type in the formula as follows. Ensure that the data type is ‘DateTime’.
2. Connect another formula tool. These are the formulae to find the difference between ‘Time_Now’ and ‘Timestamp’ and split the results into days, hours, minutes and seconds.
3. The Alteryx workflow will look like:
Overall, parsing dates ensures that date-related information is correctly processed in a consistent and meaningful way across different contexts and systems. I hope you find this blog helpful. Thanks for reading my blog.