ETL: ToString

Convert a datetime field to an ISO-8601 string or a custom date format. Use TOSTRING for date formatting and output preparation in ETL pipelines.

Description

Convert datetime field to ISO-8601 string or a custom date time format.

Syntax

ToString(Datetime_field)

ToString(Datetime_field, formatString)

Arguments

datetime_field - datetime expression.

formatString - format of the custom string. See below for formatting information.

Format strings

Symbol	Meaning	Presentation	Examples
G	era	text	AD
C	century of era (>=0)	number	20
Y	year of era (>=0)	year	1996
x	weekyear	year	1996
w	week of weekyear	number	27
e	day of week	number	2
E	day of week	text	Tuesday; Tue
y	year	year	1996
D	day of year	number	189
M	month of year	month	July; Jul; 07
d	day of month	number	10
a	halfday of day	text	PM
K	hour of halfday (0~11)	number	0
h	clockhour of halfday (1~12)	number	12
H	hour of day (0~23)	number	0
k	clockhour of day (1~24)	number	24
m	minute of hour	number	30
s	second of minute	number	55
S	fraction of second	number	978
z	time zone	text	Pacific Standard Time; PST
Z	time zone offset/id	zone	-0800; -08:00; America/Los_Angeles
\‘	escape character	for a-z/A-Z	T
\’\‘	single quote	literal single quote	’

Based on http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/apidocs/org/joda/time/format/DateTimeFormat.html

Examples

ToString(ToDate(‘2013-10-17T00:00:00.000Z’),‘MM-dd-yy’) returns a string 10-17-13

ToString(ToDate('2013-10-17T00:00:00.000Z'), 'yyyy-MM-dd\'T\'HH:mm:ss') returns a string 2013-10-17T00:00:00

Return value datatype

string

Impact of null value

If either parameter is null or not provided, returns null.