DATE macro

The DATE macro is available in IBM® Campaign and IBM® Interact.

Syntax

DATE(date_string [, format])

Parameters

date_string

Text representing a valid date.

format

One of the keywords in the table under Valid Format Keywords, specifying the date format of date_string.

Description

DATE converts a date string into a Julian date (the number of days elapsed since January 1, 0000). Virtually any date format is supported via the optional format keyword, which specifies how the date is represented. If no format keyword is supplied, the default of DELIM_M_D_Y is used.

Date formats are either fixed-width (for example, the date February 28, 1970 is represented as 02281970 in MMDDYYYY format), or delimited (for example, February 28, 1970, 2-28-1970, or 02/28/1970). All of the previous examples are variants of DELIM_M_D_YY format.

In delimited formats, delimiters are slash (/), dash(-), space ( ), comma (,), or colon (:); years can be represented by either 2 or 4 digits; and months can be fully spelled out (for example, February), abbreviated (for example, Feb), or numeric (for example, 2 or 02).

For all years specified as two-digits:

Two-digit years less than the Year 2000 threshold (default is 20, but can be set by the user) are considered to be in the 2000's.

Two-digit years greater than or equal to the threshold are considered to be in the 1900's.

Not all formats available in IBM® Campaign are supported by IBM® Interact.

Examples

DATE("8/31/2000") returns the number 730729.

Related functions

Function	Description
DATE_FORMAT	Converts dates from one format to another.
DATE_JULIAN	Returns the Julian date of the input.
DATE_STRING	Returns the date string of the Julian date.
CURRENT_DATE	Returns the current date in a specified format.