Convert pyspark string to date format

Question

I have a date pyspark dataframe with a string column in the format of MM-dd-yyyy and I am attempting to convert this into a date column.

I tried:

Answer 1

Try this:

df = spark.createDataFrame([('2018-07-27 10:30:00',)], ['Date_col'])
df.select(from_unixtime(unix_timestamp(df.Date_col, 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss')).alias('dt_col'))
df.show()
+-------------------+  
|           Date_col|  
+-------------------+  
|2018-07-27 10:30:00|  
+-------------------+