How can I disable the automatic date formatting globally?

[jwhetzel-gpc]

Hello! I'm running into an issue where my date and datetime fields coming out of sqlite are getting formatted as dates only, and I need to disable this globally. I saw in issue #1572 that the global fix is to set the desired format in options.disp_date_fmt in ~/.visidatarc. Unfortunately that won't work for me because what I really need to be able to to do is see the raw values in those columns so I can easily see which ones are date-only, which are timestamps in the format of YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS and which are formatted with a "T" in between the date and time. (YYYY-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS) This way I can know what I'm dealing with on the query side. Thanks!

[ajkerrigan]

Does using type-any (z~) or type-string (~) on that column help? Since the issue seems to be that you're losing context during the conversion to a Python datetime object, using the any/string types should avoid converting to a datetime object in the first place.

[jwhetzel-gpc]

They do work, but I would like to avoid the conversion globally every time I start visidata rather than having to remember convert them back to strings each time I look at a date or timestamp field.

[saulpw]

What sheet is this, that has a column automatically typed date? If it's a static sheet and column named e.g. date_column, you can now (in develop) add this to your .visidatarc:

Sheet.knownCols.date_column.type = anytype

and it will automatically type all columns named date_column as the anytype.

[jwhetzel-gpc]

Thanks for that, Saul. That will probably work for what I need if I run into it again in the future. With my original question being so long ago, I unfortunately cannot seem to find where I was running into that problem previously. I use Visidata for a lot of one-off stuff, so it's not something that I notice happening often. If I catch it again in the future, I'll try to include some sample data.