Reformat dates in column

Question

I have some data in an SQLite DB of the form:

id  column1  date
111 280 1/1/2014
114 275 1/2/2014

The date field is of type TEXT. I\'ve been ma

Answer 1

Without any frills such as exception handling!

This approach is slightly simpler because strptime doesn't mind about presence or absence of leading zeroes in days and months.

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> import sqlite3
>>> con = sqlite3.connect(':memory:')
>>> cur = con.cursor()
>>> cur.execute('CREATE TABLE EXAMPLE (date_column text)')

>>> cur.execute('INSERT INTO EXAMPLE VALUES ("1/1/2014")')

>>> def transformDate(aDate):
...     tempDate = datetime.strptime(aDate, '%d/%m/%Y')
...     return tempDate.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
... 
>>> transformDate('1/1/2014')
'2014-01-01'
>>> con.create_function('transformDate', 1, transformDate)
>>> cur.execute('UPDATE EXAMPLE SET date_column = transformDate(date_column)')