LAE

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Originally posted by: lauraw_21

Can anyone help me convert the above?

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Originally posted by: ryeh

There is probably a more elegant way to format the date, but this example works. It basically assigns the month number to the appropriate abbreviation.
Attachments:
formatDate.brg

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Originally posted by: lauraw_21

Worked a treat, thank you although it returns them as strings and I need them as dates?

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Originally posted by: stonysmith

It's not necessarily more "elegant", actually more "old school", but it is significantly faster than a 12-way switch()....

MMM = "JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec".substr(myda te.month()*3-3,3)

It does require the field "mydate" to be a date() datatype.

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Originally posted by: ryeh

Hi, Laura. Think of the format in which Lavastorm keeps track of dates as an arbitrary format. We happen to show it as CCYY-MM-DD in the data viewer. If you need to operate on dates, i.e. compare dates (what's before/after), get differences, offset dates, then definitely keep those fields as date types. When all is said and done, you may want to publish out to a different format. That's when you would convert to a MMM-YY format. But that would now be a string, as you noted.

So in short, if you care about how dates are formatted, save that format conversion for the last step!

As a side note: Stony, that approach was definitely more elegant and more clever. And as you said, much much faster!