Parse_Date throws illegal escape sequence: \* error

Looker Q&A Looker
1

I have a CSV data source with a date & time, it is defined as Text and contains data like this
2021-09-29T23:22:22.9273100

The documentation has this advice:
Format: 2020-03-18T16:45:00.000000
Formula: ‘PARSE_DATETIME(“%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%E\*S”, field )’

Using this formula throws an error saying that ‘\’ is an illegal escape sequence.

I only need the date part so had hoped I could just parse the date portion and tried this in the vailn hope it would work:
PARSE_DATETIME(“%Y-%m-%d”, field )
But although it doesn’t error it produces null when executed

I have already found out of date info in the documentation about ISO Week, which is now a sub-type of a data type and not a formulaic function. Is this another one of those?

Whatever it is, how do I convert my string into a date?

Thank you

2

I did a load of research and found this:

  • documentation is incorrect
  • the solution given applied to BigQuery
  • Backslashes (\) are not valid escape characters in Looker Studio formulas

Correct syntax is:

PARSE_DATETIME(“%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%E*S”, FieldName)

I hope this helps others like me!