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scotth's avatar
scotth
New Contributor II
4 years ago

Excel Parser - reading dd/mm/yyyy format

I am reading a list of Dates in excel. Excel region settings are Australian (so dd/mm/yyyy). Excel file sample is:

Using the excel parser the output is all converted to American format (mm/dd/yyyy):

SnapLogic clearly knows it is dealing with Dates.

Of course, I can convert to other formats, but are there Snaplogic settings that will keep the original format?

I guess the good news is that the integrity of the date is still correct, but why would SnapLogic change the format? If anything, I would prefer a reformat to UTC…

1 Reply

  • Matthias's avatar
    Matthias
    New Contributor III
    4 years ago

    Maybe you can try playing with the Cell formatting setting of the Excel parser snap.

    I had to apply a similar workaround to numerical values in german Excel files - which come as 2,255.90 - so we need to load the file unformatted (which brings it as 2255,90- and then replace , with . before running parseFloat() (otherwise parseFloat fails).

    We do have an open issue for this, but to me, the excel parser snap is not very mature, and will potentially have quite some edgecases noone thought about (i encountered mine on the first usage of that snap).

    The parser knows it’s dealing with dates - but returns it as string (the same happens with numbers) - why - only snaplogic will know. Probably an oversight in the initial release, which is now very difficult to change in a non-breaking manner.