I am using Carla to read an input file with two fields (A numeric field which is a date and a text field) see below.  I would like to select records based on the date and be able to use the TODAY keyword. But I am not having any luck converting the numeric field to a valid date.  

Input File:

20251202 RECORD12
20251102 RECORD11
20251002 RECORD10
20250902 RECORD9 
20250802 RECORD8 
20250702 RECORD7 
20250602 RECORD6 
20250502 RECORD5 
20250402 RECORD4 
20250302 RECORD3 
20250202 RECORD2 
20250102 RECORD1 

I am trying to convert the numeric field to a date using Carla

deftype type=$input                           
alloc   type=$input  dd=INPUT                 
 newlist type=$INPUT DD=OUTREC                
 def date8(date,8,'Date8') as ,               
 convert(substr(record,1,8),datetime,date)    
 def date10($date,10,'Date10') as ,           
 convert(substr(record,1,8),datetime,date)    
 def mydate(8,'MyDate') as substr(record,1,8) 
 def text(8,'MyRecord') as substr(record,10,8)
  select date8<today-30                          
 sortlist,                                    
  date8 date10 mydate text  

Output file: Note the dates should be for example 02Jan25 and 2025-01-02 but they are converting to Jan 10th 2025.

Date8    Date10     MyDate   MyRecord  
10Jan25  2025-01-10 20250102 RECORD1   
20Jan25  2025-01-20 20250202 RECORD2   
30Jan25  2025-01-30 20250302 RECORD3   
 9Feb25  2025-02-09 20250402 RECORD4   
19Feb25  2025-02-19 20250502 RECORD5   
 1Mar25  2025-03-01 20250602 RECORD6   
11Mar25  2025-03-11 20250702 RECORD7   
21Mar25  2025-03-21 20250802 RECORD8   
31Mar25  2025-03-31 20250902 RECORD9   
10Apr25  2025-04-10 20251002 RECORD10  
20Apr25  2025-04-20 20251102 RECORD11  
30Apr25  2025-04-30 20251202 RECORD12                   

Also is there a way to convert a Carla date to this format YYYYMMDD without / or - ?

For Example, 22Apr25 convert to 20250422

Hi Scott

The manual shows a sample datetime input format as 11 Nov 2019 13:10:00.  But when I look at the day and month values in your DATE8 and DATE10 columns, I suspect that the input format interprets your 8 digit date as a JULIAN date: 20251202 -> 2025.120 -> April 30, 2025, and it ignores the 8th character.

If you could massage the format of your data set, can you insert dashes between the year, month and day parts?

> Also is there a way to convert a Carla date to this format YYYYMMDD without / or - ?

This request has been made more times than I can count, and never made it to the development list.  Feel free to open an Idea but also check how many Ideas there are already that don't get implemented.  Anyway, you could look at composing the date from 3 parts like

sortlist date10(year) | date10(usdate,2) | date10(eudate,2)

Horribly inefficient because the date is calculated and converted 3 times, but hey, it may get you what you need.  Here is a sample of date output strings. 

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Rob van Hoboken
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