diff --git a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib_exp/adaptors/__init__.py b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib_exp/adaptors/__init__.py
index 18ff8260c..8bbc50d6f 100644
--- a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib_exp/adaptors/__init__.py
+++ b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib_exp/adaptors/__init__.py
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 from scrapy.contrib_exp.adaptors.extraction import extract, ExtractImageLinks
 from scrapy.contrib_exp.adaptors.markup import remove_tags, remove_root, unquote
 from scrapy.contrib_exp.adaptors.misc import to_unicode, clean_spaces, strip, drop_empty, delist, Regex
+from scrapy.contrib_exp.adaptors.date import to_date
 
diff --git a/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib_exp/adaptors/date.py b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib_exp/adaptors/date.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..989f14c0b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/scrapy/trunk/scrapy/contrib_exp/adaptors/date.py
@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+import time
+
+def to_date(format):
+    """
+    Converts a date string to a YYYY-MM-DD one suitable for DateField
+
+    format is the format string passed to time.strptime
+    
+    Input: string/unicode
+    Output: string
+    """
+    def _to_date(value):
+        return time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d', time.strptime(value, format))
+    return _to_date