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Spark to_date() – Convert String to Date format

Naveen Nelamali
spark convert string date

In this tutorial, we will show you a Spark SQL example of how to convert String to Date format using  to_date() function on the DataFrame column with Scala example.

Note that Spark Date Functions support all Java Date formats specified in DateTimeFormatter.

to_date() – function is used to format string (StringType) to date (DateType) column.


Syntax: to_date(dateColumn:Column,format:String) : Column

Below code, snippet takes the date in a string and converts it to date format on DataFrame.


  Seq(("06-03-2009"),("07-24-2009")).toDF("Date").select(
    col("Date"),
    to_date(col("Date"),"MM-dd-yyyy").as("to_date")
  ).show()

Output:


+----------+----------+
|      Date|   to_date|
+----------+----------+
|06-03-2009|2009-06-03|
|07-24-2009|2009-07-24|
+----------+----------+

Complete Example


package com.sparkbyexamples.spark.dataframe.functions.datetime

import org.apache.spark.sql.SparkSession
import org.apache.spark.sql.functions.{col, to_date}

object StringToDate extends App {

  val spark:SparkSession = SparkSession.builder()
    .master("local")
    .appName("SparkByExamples.com")
    .getOrCreate()
  spark.sparkContext.setLogLevel("ERROR")

  import spark.sqlContext.implicits._

  Seq(("06-03-2009"),("07-24-2009")).toDF("Date").select(
    col("Date"),
    to_date(col("Date"),"MM-dd-yyyy").as("to_date")
  ).show()
}

Conclusion:

In this article, you have learned how to convert String to Date format using Date functions.

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