Convert Date Formats in a Text file with Perl
Posted on Jan 15, 2022 by kingbeowulf
A query was posted recently on a list on how to convert date formats in the form of "month/day/year" into a more standard unambiguous "year-month-day". I dabbled in Perl a very long time ago and so thought I'd take a look. After searching the Internet and some practice, here is my stab at it. For an example csv text file, for tabular data in this case:
1COLA,DATE,COLB,COLC 2xxxx,12/15/2021,xxxx,xxxx 3xxxx,01/14/2022,xxxx,xxxx
The following Perl script will flip the order.
1#!/usr/bin/perl 2 3# searches for xx/yy/zzzz (month/day/year) date pattern and converts 4# to zzzz-xx-yy in a text file (csv in this case). 5 6open(FH,"myfile.csv") or die "Can’t open file-$1"; 7open(WH,">new_myfile.csv") or die "Can’t open file in write mode- $!"; 8 9while(my $line = <FH>){ 10 $line =~s/(\d{2})\/(\d{2})\/(\d{4})/$3-$1-$2/g; 11 print WH $line; 12} 13 14close(FH); 15close(WH);
We now have:
1COLA,DATE,COLB,COLC 2xxxx,2021-12-15,xxxx,xxxx 3xxxx,2022-01-14,xxxx,xxxx
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