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Is there a built-in function to check string is date or not ?

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Posted on by Teevo

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Hi guys,

I'm reading data from CSV, and part of the data is a date. But as usual, there will be some value error usually relate to user given wrong date format, or the value not even a date. So when I'm put in variable Transdate, we get error. Is there built-in function to check whether the value we read is a date or not ?

Or how is the best way to handle this ?

Thanks,

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Martin Dráb 237,807 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Sure, it's possible to do, but which function you should use depends on what exactly you need. Don't forget that there isn't a single format (e.g. 1\1\2012 or 15. července 2023 are also valid dates, although you'll likely want to reject them.

For example, there is str2date() function or System.DateTime::ParseExact().

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Teevo 395 on at

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Hi Martin,

But str2Date function means we already know the format, where is the position of the date, month, and year because we also need to specify sequence.

I mean do we have function like IsDate() or something like that ? If I remembered correctly there is such function in PowerApps. It will return false if the parameter given is not a date.

Thanks

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Martin Dráb 237,807 Most Valuable Professional on at

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If you don't know the format, you can't meaningfully decide whether it's a date or not. Are you sure that your CSV file can contain something like 15. července 2023 and you want to accept it as a date?

If you don't want to specify a format, you must assume a particular format (or a few formats) under the hood.

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Anthony Blake 2,956 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Have you considered using regex?

It's horrible to read/write but there's load of examples on the web for date format validation, you could hide the ugliness away in a helper class.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15491894/regex-to-validate-date-formats-dd-mm-yyyy-dd-mm-yyyy-dd-mm-yyyy-dd-mmm-yyyy

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Martin Dráb 237,807 Most Valuable Professional on at

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In my opinion, trying to reimplement all the logic of System.Date::ParseExact() means spending a lot of time to get a worse result. Even such seemingly basic things like leap years are more complex than many developers realize. I wouldn't even think about it when we already have the solution available and tested for many years.

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