CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I wonder if it might be possible, in an upcoming release, to make the import algorithms a little more robust when it comes to handling dates.  It seems to me that it ought to be possible to have the import code recognize a number of common date formats automatically, rather than having to select one on the import page.  I know there are perl modules which do this - I assume the same is probably available for PHP.

The issue is that I'm in the process of importing 15,000+ contacts with some rather sparsely-populated date fields.  Many of the values in the date fields were entered manually and, as a result, occur in a variety of formats - common formats, but not uniform.  Since the import process takes so long - I can only get about 750 or so before it times out - correcting one or two in each batch slows things down enormously.  It would improve the usability of import a lot if the date handling could be a little more forgiving.

Thanks.

Hi,

In general, the format of the various fields should be more permisive IMO (eg. M, Male, Mr should all be valid for the gender).

As for the date, we will always have the month vs day issue: 09/11/2001 is the 9th of November 2001 on about anywhere else than in the US. Can't imagine how the computer could decide that it should be the 11th of September 2001.

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