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

In the accepted answer's update you don't see the example for the to_date function, so another solution using it would be:

from pyspark.sql import functions as F

df = df.withColumn(
            'new_date',
                F.to_date(
                    F.unix_timestamp('STRINGCOLUMN', 'MM-dd-yyyy').cast('timestamp')))