>>I am just about completing a fairly extensive import utility of CSV files, and have a potential concern about this type of date found as a character (I was thinking there was a built in VFP way to make this conversion, but can't remember what it was) :
>>
>>December 12, 2016 or Dec. 12, 2016
>>
>>If I allow a user to select the above as a Date field, I need to convert it to a normal 12/12/2016 which is stored as a date field in the table. Anyone know the best way to do this? I will not know ahead how the date is stored and will be testing it before appending it to the actual date field in the table.
>
>I would
>(1) Get all possible formats - eg as well Dec 12, 2016, 12/12/2016, 12-12-2016, etc
>(2) Write a class that uses regular expressions one per format, and a method per format to convert to a date
>
>That way, you can expand it later if another format turns up
>You can use a collection, each member having
>- the regex pattern
>- the regular expression object
>- a method ( name) to call if the regex matches - you can pass the matches collection to the method
>
>Then it's just a matter of looping through the collection

Thanks Gregory....good idea and also good suggestion. This is a close suggestion to what I was already beginning to develop.