ybload Date Formats ​

This section describes the date formats supported by ybload operations. A ybload date format consists of two parts:

• A date style, which describes how a date value is expressed. For example, YMD style means that a date value is expected to have year, month, and day pieces, in that order.
• A date delimiter, which is the character that separates the date parts, such as a hyphen (-) or a backslash (/).

You can define acceptable date formats within --date-field-options, using the following syntax. In this example, MONDY2 is the date style and - is the delimiter:

"formats":[{"style":"MDY","delim":"-"}]

You can also define date formats within --per-field-options, when the field in question is being loaded into a DATE column.

As a shortcut, you can define date styles with the --date-style option, but you cannot set the delimiter with that option.

Supported Date Styles ​

The following table lists the legal date styles that you can use within --date-field-options, --per-field-options, and --date-style.

Note: If you do not specify date styles explicitly, the default styles that are accepted are YMD, DMONY, and MONDY.

Note the following requirements for defining date styles:

• If you are using a date style with a two-digit year (Y2), you need to set the --y2base option.
• The bulk load parser recognizes YMD, DMONY, and MONDY automatically, but the other styles need to be set explicitly.
• The DMY and MDY date styles are ambiguous and cannot be specified together in one ybload command.

Supported Date Delimiters ​

The delim setting defines the delimiter between the day, month, and year parts of a date. You can use default supported delimiters within the date string or set a different delimiter.

The following delimiters are supported:

• auto (the default), which means any one of the following: " ", ".", "-", "/", "|", ","
• Empty string (""). Note that auto also allows the empty string ("") when style is set to YMD.
• Any other explicitly specified character sequence. You may have fields to load that have special delimiter strings.

Examples ​

The following --date-field-options setting allows dates with two different date styles to be loaded from the same file:

--date-field-options '{"formats":[{"style":"YMD"},{"style":"MDY"}]}'

In this case, dates such as 2016-10-05 and 10-05-2016 can be loaded.

The following example extends the first by specifying that the delimiter for both date styles must be a tab character (\t):

--date-field-options '{"formats":[{"style":"YMD","delim":"\t"},{"style":"MDY","delim":"\t"}]}'

In this case, dates such as 2016 10 05 and 10 05 2016, where the white space represents a tab, can be loaded.

The following example sets the y2base year to 1968 and the date style to MDY2:

--date-field-options {"y2base":1968,"formats":["MDY2"]}

In this case, dates such as 10-11-10 are understood to refer to the year 2010.