Question

I am trying to ‘normalize’ some data from a column that has two date formats, one like “Mon dd, yyyy and another “YYYY-mm-dd”. I would like to convert all of the first into the second format, and then change the column type to date.

I imagine it is something like this:

UPDATE table SET 
`thedate` = DATE_FORMAT(`thedate`, '%Y-%m-%d')
WHERE `thedate` LIKE '%,%'

but the DATE_FORMAT is the wrong function, I think.

Any ideas?

thanks.

Answer 1

I think I got it.

SELECT date_format( str_to_date( thedate, '%M %d, %Y' ) , '%Y-%m-%d' ) 
newdate, thedate 
FROM donor
WHERE `thedate` LIKE '%,%'