Enhance Auto Field Tool to Include Better Date Time Data Type Detection

[jyeh]

With the increase number of JSON feeds and the need to properly define the data type for date and date/time fields. It would be useful to have the Auto Field tool detect common date and date/time formats from Strings and assign the Date, Date Time, or Time data type.

Given the following input data:

The select tool confirms is a String

If we use the Auto Field as:

The result is still a String data type (2nd Select Tool)

I would expect this to be Date Time.

One solution would be to create a formula and parse it, but this is not suitable for situations that the field names are unknown.

It would be much easier to have the work done by Auto Field.

[Community_Admin]

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[SeanAdams]

This seems to be a useful idea - if I understand correctly, you're suggesting that AutoField be augmented to look for dates with common formats and then auto-types and auto-converts these?

Makes sense, and it would speed up quite a lot of data cleansing.

[jyeh]

A python implementation would be:

import datefinder

text = "If there is a date here, Sunday, July 23, 2022, the following should return it"

result = datefinder.find_dates(text) # datetime (2022, 07, 23, 0, 0)