topic Date format in Arcade gives wrong results in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Date format in Arcade gives wrong results

kirken — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:20:59 GMT

Hi! I'm trying to understand how to generate dates using Arcade but it's quite confusing.

1. Why does this code

return Date(2020,11,02);

return a result : 01.12.2020 22:00:00 ????

I get very weird results when trying to use this function 😞

2. Then again, when trying to convert from string I get better results:

var year = Year(`20201102`); //02.11.2020 -> November 2, 2020
var month = Month(`20201102`);
var day = Day(`20201102`);
return Date(year, month, day, 0, 0, 0, 0);

returns 01.11.2020 22:00:00 which is almost correct, but still 1 day less than correct

3. How to get rid from minutes - hours- second ?

very confused

thanks

Re: Date format in Arcade gives wrong results

DanPatterson — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:43:07 GMT

Date Functions | ArcGIS for Developers

Are you using local time or UTC time. You first example is a date format issue/choice offset by a small time difference. So check both and the format links as well

Re: Date format in Arcade gives wrong results

KenBuja — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 13:34:31 GMT

In addition to @DanPatterson answer, when you create a date using year, month, day, the month is 0-based (0=January and 11=December)

Re: Date format in Arcade gives wrong results

XanderBakker — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:20:34 GMT

Hi @kirken ,

@KenBuja answered your first question indicating that the month is 0 based (November would be represented by 10)

For the second question, I notice a couple of things. The Year, Month, and Day functions according to the documentation require a date to extract these values. You provide a string. Also, you used the names of functions for your variables and you should be careful about that. The fact that you got a result baffles me a bit, but I would not recommend taking this road.

If you have a text that represents a date, you will probably have to extract the different parts, convert them to numbers and then provide these numbers to the Date function correcting the month value for being 0-based.

var datetext = '20201102'; var y = Number(Left(datetext, 4)); var m = Number(Mid(datetext, 4, 2)); var d = Number(Right(datetext, 2)); Console(y); Console(m); Console(d); return Date(y, m-1, d);

Unfortunately, Arcade does not have a strptime() function like in Python which can convert a string to date using a provided patterns... (and yes @DanPatterson in Python this would be a lot easier).

Re: Date format in Arcade gives wrong results

kirken — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 06:34:29 GMT

Thanks a lot, it's clear now!!!!

Re: Date format in Arcade gives wrong results

FranEvanisko — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 01:02:16 GMT

I have no idea why someone would decide to numerate months between 0 and 11 rather than between 1 and 12. How does this make sense. I guess it is not a big deal after you become familiar with this feature, however it is very error-prone.

Re: Date format in Arcade gives wrong results

DonaldMarutaNHS — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 14:13:02 GMT

I have just fallen foul of this, and spent the last hour or so, going over my code wondering why I'm not getting the correct results for my calculations!!!