Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress 4GL Reference

DATE function

Converts a single character string, a set of month, day, and year values, an integer expression, a DATETIME expression, or a DATETIME-TZ expression into a date.

If the DATE function cannot produce a valid date given the specified argument(s), it returns a runtime error.

Syntax

DATE ( month , day , year )

DATE ( string )

DATE ( integer-expression )

DATE ( datetime-expression )

month

A constant, field name, variable name, or expression whose value is an integer from 1 to 12, inclusive.

day

An expression whose value is an integer from 1 to the highest valid day of the month.

year

An expression whose value is the year (for example, 1994).

string

A character string containing a date value to convert into a DATE data type. The string value must have the format specified by the Date Format (-d) startup parameter (the default is mdy). Note that -d sets the display format, not the date storage format, which is fixed. Furthermore, date constants entered in procedures, or as initial values in the Data Dictionary, are always specified in month/day/year format.

You do not have to specify separator characters for the month, day, and year components of the date string; however, slashes(/), periods(.), and hyphens(-) are accepted as separator characters.

integer-expression

An expression that evaluates to a signed integer value that represents the number of days since the origin of the 4GL date data type. Usually this integer is obtained from a previous operation where the date was converted to an integer using the INTEGER(4GL-date) function.

The value of the expression cannot exceed the maximum date value, which is 12/31/32767.

Note: The resulting date from the DATE(integer-expression) function is guaranteed to be a valid 4GL date only if the integer-expression originated from the INTEGER(4GL-date) function.

datetime-expression

An expression that evaluates to a DATETIME or DATETIME-TZ. The DATE function returns the date portion of the datetime-expression as a DATE.

If datetime-expression is a DATETIME-TZ, the DATE function returns the date relative to the time zone of the DATETIME-TZ value. For example, a DATETIME-TZ field, fdt, is created in London (time zone UTC+00:00) with a value of May 5, 2002 at 7:15:03.002 am. DATE (fdt) returns 05/05/2002, regardless of the session’s time zone.

Examples

This procedure reads data from an input file that contains date information from another system stored as character strings without slashes or dashes between month, day, and year. It tries to convert these dates to Progress dates. Some formats cannot be successfully converted. For example:

r-date.p

/* r-date.p */ DEFINE VARIABLE cnum as CHAR FORMAT "x(3)". DEFINE VARIABLE cdate as CHAR FORMAT "x(16)". DEFINE VARIABLE iday as INTEGER. DEFINE VARIABLE imon as INTEGER. DEFINE VARIABLE iyr as INTEGER. DEFINE VARIABLE ddate as DATE. INPUT FROM VALUE(SEARCH("r-date.dat")). REPEAT: SET cnum cdate. imon = INTEGER(SUBSTR(cdate,1,2)). iday = INTEGER(SUBSTR(cdate,4,2)). iyr = INTEGER(SUBSTR(cdate,7,2)). IF (iyr < 50) /*WORKS FOR YEARS WITHIN 50 of 2000*/ THEN iyr = iyr + 2000. ELSE iyr = iyr + 1900. ddate = DATE(imon,iday,iyr). DISPLAY ddate. END. INPUT CLOSE.

The following example shows the DATE (string) syntax:

r-date2.p

/* r-date2.p */ DEFINE VARIABLE cnum AS CHARACTER FORMAT "x(3)". DEFINE VARIABLE cdate AS CHARACTER FORMAT "x(16)". DEFINE VARIABLE ddate AS DATE FORMAT "99/99/9999". INPUT FROM VALUE(SEARCH("r-date.dat")). REPEAT: SET cnum cdate. ddate = DATE(cdate). DISPLAY ddate. END. INPUT CLOSE.

This example produces the following output. It produces no date for the first example since spaces are not a valid date separator:

cnum cdate ddate ---- ---------------- ---------- nyd 01 01 86 ad 11-28-52 11/28/1952 red 12/08/56 12/08/1956 nsm 10.01.01 10/01/2001 hrl 1/8/1994 10/08/1994

See also

DATE-FORMAT attribute, DATETIME function, DATETIME-TZ function, DAY function, ETIME function, ISO-DATE function, MONTH function, MTIME function, NOW function, TIME function, TIMEZONE function, TODAY function, WEEKDAY function, YEAR function, YEAR-OFFSET attribute