Standardize Dates Without Lying
Clean mixed date formats while preserving ambiguous values.
A CSV contains 06/07/26, 2026-07-06, and July 6 2026. The sales report needs weekly cohorts by noon. Tidy structure requires one variable to hold one kind of value. Dates should be machine-readable, consistently typed, and unambiguous. But standardizing dates is risky because regional formats can reverse month and day. The correct workflow parses only values with enough evidence, flags ambiguous values, and documents assumptions. The common trap is editing visible bad values directly, then losing the ability to explain which rows changed and why. Profile formats Count date patterns before parsing. Pattern counts reveal ambiguity and prevent a parser from…
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