setColDateFormats#

Purpose#

Specifies how GAUSS should display dates using the BSD strftime format specifiers. Note that this will also convert the type of the columns specified by column to Date.

Format#

x_date = setColDateFormats(X, fmt, columns)#

Parameters:

X (NxK matrix or dateframe) – data.
fmt (Mx1 string array) – contains strftime date/time format characters.
columns (Mx1 scalar or string) – The names or indices of the date columns in X to set format of.

Returns:

x_date (NxK dataframe) – contains metadata assigning the date display format specified by fmt to the variables in x specified by columns.

Examples#

// Load data
fname = getGAUSSHome("examples/xle_daily.xlsx");
xle = loadd(fname, "date(Date) + Volume");

// Print the first 2 observations
print "Dates in original format:";
print xle[1:2,.];

// Set date format to month/day/Year
xle_2 = setcoldateformats(xle, "%m/%d/%Y", "Date");

// Print the first 2 observations
print "";
print "Dates in new format:";
print xle_2[1:2,.];

The above code will print out:

Dates in original format:
            Date          Volume
      2017-06-13        15807900
      2017-06-14        30280200

Dates in new format:
            Date          Volume
      06/13/2017        15807900
      06/14/2017        30280200

Remarks#

You can find a list of the available date format specifiers in the Command Reference entry for posixtostrc().