Blue Prism How to calculate text date times?

[Digital_WorkerB]

is it possible to calculate text dates? Or to remove just the rest of my text?

I need to calculate days of leave. I have two data items and I must substract one from another. For example 11/3/2017 12:00:00 AM - 3/31/2017 12:00:00 AM. How can I do this? So far I've tried Replace function. I wanted to use Mid, Trim and Left but the characters in my date items are going to change. so sometimes I will have 9 characters (11/3/2017) and sometimes 8 (1/3/2017).

Which function could I use ? this format is month/day/year and mine is day/month/year

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Disclaimer: This content was auto-posted from Stackoverflow. The original Stackoverflow question is here Stackoverflow Post, posted by Daenerys.

[DarrellColeman]

There are several ways to accomplish what you are trying to do. But I think the easiest approach will be as follows...

Assumptions: [Date String 1] and [Date String 2] are Text data items, containing the values "11/3/2017 12:00:00 AM" and "3/31/2017 12:00:00 AM" respectively. [Date 1] and [Date 1] are Date data items.

• Use a Multi Calc stage to convert the Text data items containing the date strings to data items of Date type
  • Example: 
    • Assign the result of ToDate(Trim([Date String 1])) to [Date 1]
    • Assign the result of ToDate(Trim([Date String 2])) to [Date 2]

• Use a Calc stage to execute the DateDiff function on the Date type data items populated from the previous step
  • Example:
    • DateDiff(9, [Date 2], [Date 1]) will yield 217 days

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Darrell Coleman
Digital Exchange Technical Reviewer
Blue Prism
America/New_York
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