How to convert a column of string dates into a column unix epochs in spark

Question

I am new to spark and scala and I would like to convert a column of string dates, into Unix epochs. My dataframe looks like this:

+----------+-------+
|   Dates  |Reports|
+----------+-------+
|2020-07-20|     34|
|2020-07-21|     86|
|2020-07-22|    129|
|2020-07-23|     98|
+--------+---------+
The output should be 
+----------+-------+
|   Dates  |Reports|
+----------+-------+
|1595203200|     34|
|1595289600|     86|
|1595376000|    129|
|1595462400|     98|
+--------+---------+
``

Answer 1

Use unix_timestamp.

val df = Seq(("2020-07-20")).toDF("date")
df.show
df.withColumn("unix_time", unix_timestamp('date, "yyyy-MM-dd")).show

+----------+
|      date|
+----------+
|2020-07-20|
+----------+

+----------+----------+
|      date| unix_time|
+----------+----------+
|2020-07-20|1595203200|
+----------+----------+