The PARSE-AS-DATE directive is for parsing dates using natural language processing.
parse-as-date <column> [<time-zone>]
The PARSE-AS-DATE directive will apply standard language recognition and translation techniques to produce a list of corresponding dates with optional parse and syntax information.
It recognizes dates described in many ways, including formal dates (02/28/1979), relaxed dates (oct 1st),
relative dates (the day before next thursday), and even date alternatives (next wed or thurs).
This directive will also search for date components within a larger block of text, detect their structure, and create dates.
It will create a new column using the syntax <column>_1 containing the results of parsing.
If <time-zone> is not provided, UTC is used as the timezone.
Using this record as an example:
{
"create_date": "now",
}
Applying this directive:
parse-as-date create_date US/Eastern
would result in this record (the actual results depending on when this was run):
{
"create_date": "now",
"create_date_1": "Mon May 01 14:13:35 EDT 2017"
}