Initializing date format

Question

I am reading birthdates from a file. They are the format 2-Aug-83, 11-Jun-03. Is there a way to read these in and change the format to the default DD/MM/YYYY? This is the idea, but it is not syntactically valid, clearly. I have found so little online on using date masks and it stumps me each time that I encounter non-default date formats in data. (I wish I could make a stronger attempt but I am at a loss on how to begin.)

Here is the idea of what I want to do:

DEFINE VARIABLE dBirthday AS DATE FORMAT "DD-MON-YY".

dBirthday = 2-AUG-80.

DISPLAY dBirthday FORMAT "DD/MM/YYYY".

Answer 1

You're probably better off by reading it às a character variable and then parsing it as an Openedge date format.

So this

dBirthday = 2-AUG-80.

wouldn't work because it's not how the date format works. You could do something along the lines of

dBirthday = fParseOracleDate("2-AUG-80").

FUNCTION fParseOracleDate RETURNS DATE (cDate AS CHARACTER):
   DEF VAR iMonth AS INT.
   CASE ENTRY(2, cDate, '-'):
      WHEN 'Jan' THEN ASSIGN iMonth = 1.
      /* all months here */
   END CASE.
   RETURN DATE(iMonth, INT(ENTRY(1, cDate,'-')), INT(ENTRY(3, cDate, '-'))).
END FUNCTION.

Sorry for the sloppy code, typing on my phone.