Converting Date and Time Values

Note that conversion functions (and any other functions that require a specific type of input, such as a date or time value) depend on the current formats specified in the Stream Options dialog box. For example, if you have a field named DATE that is stored as a string with values Jan 2003, Feb 2003, and so on, you could convert it to date storage as follows:

to_date(DATE)

For this conversion to work, select the matching date format MON YYYY as the default date format for the stream.

For an example that converts string values to dates using a Filler node, see the stream broadband_create_models.str, installed in the \Demos folder under the streams subfolder.

Dates stored as numbers. Note that DATE in the previous example is the name of a field, while to_date is a CLEM function. If you have dates stored as numbers, you can convert them using the datetime_date function, where the number is interpreted as a number of seconds since the base date (or epoch).

datetime_date(DATE)

By converting a date to a number of seconds (and back), you can perform calculations such as computing the current date plus or minus a fixed number of days, for example:

datetime_date((date_in_days(DATE)-7)*60*60*24)