Change Date from dd-mmm-yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy

stringzz · #1 (**permalink**) 03-27-2008

I want to change a date from format dd-mmm-yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy. Is there a way to do this with sed or do you have to write a case statement to convert JAN to 01? Thanks

danmero · #2 (**permalink**) 03-27-2008

On FreeBSD:

Code:

date -j -f "%d-%b-%Y" "27-Mar-2008" "+%m/%d/%Y"

stringzz · #3 (**permalink**) 03-27-2008

Maybe I should have mentioned that I am using korn shell. I get an error when using that.

> date "%d-%b-%Y" "27-Mar-2008" "+%m/%d/%Y"
date: bad conversion

danmero · #4 (**permalink**) 03-28-2008

Next time you should mention your shell and your OS from the beginning

Code:

echo "28-Mar-2008" | date -d - "+%m/%d/%Y"

or..

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
d="28-Mar-2008"
date -d $d "+%m/%d/%Y"

You should take a look over man date anyway.

era · #5 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008

Not all date implementations have all this fancy shmancy stuff. As a matter of fact, on HP-UX or Sun, you should be thankful that it even displays today's date.

If you can't get a good date (sorry, couldn't resist), then yes, sed (or cut, or awk, or perl, or nearly any programming language you happen to know the basics of) can be used to move around parts within the string.

(True story from real life: I had a colleague who needed to remove duplicate lines from a file. I intercepted him when he had exported the file to his University account and loaded it into SPSS which he was more familiar with, but couldn't quite get to do this precise task.)

But yes, you need the month name to number mapping somehow. somebody posted one awk solution the other day, but I can't seem to find it now. If the input is just the date then twelve lines of sed will do it.

ghostdog74 · #6 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by stringzz

I want to change a date from format dd-mmm-yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy. Is there a way to do this with sed or do you have to write a case statement to convert JAN to 01? Thanks

Code:

# echo "dd-mmm-yyyy" | awk 'BEGIN{FS="-";OFS="/"}{print $2,$1,$3}'
mmm/dd/yyyy

era · #7 (**permalink**) 03-29-2008

Add to the BEGIN { m[jan] = 1; m[feb] = 2; ... etc } and there you have it. Like I said, somebody posted code like this I think only yesterday, but I wasn't able to bring it up with a search.

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