Want to get involved? We're always looking for ideas and content for Weekly Challenges.
SUBMIT YOUR IDEAThe link to last week’s exercise (exercise #45) is HERE
I love to share real world use cases as exercises. This week’s exercise comes from a customer that had data coming from in a legacy system and needed to transform the date field for a new system. It is a straightforward exercise but shows how easily Alteryx can apply business logic to most any data transformation problem.
Use case: The Input contains dates formatted as year, month and day. In this case, the first character determines if the year should begin with 19 or 20. If the first character is 0 then the year starts with 19, and when the first character is 1 the year starts with 20. The remainder of the date following the 0 or 1 is the remaining year digits followed by month followed by day.
Objective: Please convert these strings into date formatted field.
How about a formula expression of: DateTimeParse(Switch(Left([date],1),'','0','19','1','20')+Right([date],6),'%Y%m%d')
one more approch
Same approach as provided by @LBhat
My solution...
But someone please tell me I'm not crazy, and that this is exactly the same problem as Challenge #58... right?? I am doing these challenges in a bit of a random order, but I am having a total twilight zone moment because i JUST did this one, I kid you not, earlier today. :)
Rather than taking the easy way out, I took at shot at the one-tool formula method (basically just trying to be in the same cool one-tool club as @Joe_Mako from #46 and @MarqueeCrew & @JoeM from #58...). Took a few tries (dates are not my forte), but eventually figured it out.
Working through the backlog of these as I get the chance.
Is it wrong to do these challenges in my free time, in place of going outside and interacting with the "real" world?
I need to get out more...