topic Re: Date displaying as a string in Splunk Search

Date displaying as a string

cc3658 — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 17:09:27 GMT

I have a string field (publication_date) that is displaying a date in the following format YYYY/mm/dd. Ultimately I would like to display in a dashboard any logs displaying a publication_date within the last 7 days.

I suspect I am having trouble because it is a sting field and not numeric but have been unsuccessful in finding the correct syntax.

Re: Date displaying as a string

DalJeanis — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 21:21:21 GMT

In general, you want the strptime() function to change the display format into epoch time format, and strftime() to go the other way.

However, in this case, because the ISO format you showed will sort dates into the same order, you can just change current date - 7 days into the same format and compare directly.

  | eval testDate = strftime(now()-7*24*3600,"%Y/%m/%d")
  | where publication_date >= testDate

Change >= to > if you want to exclude the date one week ago (ie exclude last Friday if today is Friday).

Re: Date displaying as a string

cc3658 — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 17:09:33 GMT

This worked for me. This is the part that I was missing "(now()-7*24*3600" Thanks!

Re: Date displaying as a string

DalJeanis — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 22:36:07 GMT

@cc3658 - in real code, I'd multiply that out, but for the forum I wanted it to be obvious what the number meant.