Convert pyspark string to date format

Question

I have a date pyspark dataframe with a string column in the format of MM-dd-yyyy and I am attempting to convert this into a date column.

I tried:

Answer 1

from datetime import datetime
from pyspark.sql.functions import col, udf
from pyspark.sql.types import DateType



# Creation of a dummy dataframe:
df1 = sqlContext.createDataFrame([("11/25/1991","11/24/1991","11/30/1991"), 
                            ("11/25/1391","11/24/1992","11/30/1992")], schema=['first', 'second', 'third'])

# Setting an user define function:
# This function converts the string cell into a date:
func =  udf (lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%m/%d/%Y'), DateType())

df = df1.withColumn('test', func(col('first')))

df.show()

df.printSchema()

Here is the output:

+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|     first|    second|     third|      test|
+----------+----------+----------+----------+
|11/25/1991|11/24/1991|11/30/1991|1991-01-25|
|11/25/1391|11/24/1992|11/30/1992|1391-01-17|
+----------+----------+----------+----------+

root
 |-- first: string (nullable = true)
 |-- second: string (nullable = true)
 |-- third: string (nullable = true)
 |-- test: date (nullable = true)