Import Pages from CSV: FieldtypeDate problem

[doolak]

I had to import over 500 of members as pages into PW, so i am using the Import Pages module.

I wondered why a lot of members are imported without their birth date and i found out that the module seems to import one date format wrong:

I was using the date format dd/mm/yyyy in the CSV - but it seems that it was imported as mm/dd/yyyy and the dates which have a day higher than 12 were not saved.

In PW FieldtypeDate everything seems to be fine, i guess there is just a problem in the Import module.

Now i changed the CSV to dd.mm.yyyy, changed the date to the same format in the PW date field and everything is imported correctly.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

Thanks doolak for the tip.

I find dates are a chore to get right -- not in ProcessWire but just overall because of how people use dates.

I am doing a project now for a TV station with hundreds of shows, each with an "air date." The client provided a spreadsheet with a date column. But the dates are entered over the years in very inconsistent ways, so import won't work.

I had thought of using a few rounds of search and replace to normalize the dates, but it isn't possible. Again, this is not specific to ProcessWire.

How are other people handling these sorts of cases?

Thanks,

Matthew

[ryan]

This is due to the way strtotime() interprets dates. It interprets dates with slashes as US-style mm/dd/yy and dates with hyphens or periods as dd-mm-yy.