Neo4j 3.4 saw the introduction of the temporal date type , and while there is now powerful in built functionality, converting strings to dates is still a challenge.

If our string is in the format yyyy-MM-dd we can call the date function with that string and have it converted to a date automatically:

RETURN date("2019-06-04") AS date

Executing this query will return the following result:

One way we can solve this problem is by manually parsing our string into its different components using the split function. We can then create a date from those components:

WITH [item in split("20/07/2018", "/") | toInteger(item)] AS dateComponents
RETURN date({day: dateComponents[0], month: dateComponents[1], year: dateComponents[2]}) AS date

Executing this query will return the following result:

Alternatively we can use the APOC library’s apoc.date.parse function to massage our data into a supported format. This function gives us a flexible way for handling different date and time patterns.

The following query:

Uses the apoc.date.parse function to convert our dd/MM/yyyy date string into a timestamp in milliseconds

Creates a datetime from that timestamp

Creates a date from that datetime

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