The PARSE-AS-DATE directive is for parsing dates using natural language processing.
parse-as-date <column> [<time-zone>]
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.
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"
}