On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 04:17:52PM +0200, Soeren Gerlach wrote: > I've an integer column in a certain table that I need to convert into a > timestamp value to finally get a day difference to the current date. > >From the manual it looks like straight forward, but the following line > is a great mistery for me: > > SELECT to_timestamp(to_char(20041217, '9999 99 99'), 'YYYY MM DD') > > results in a timestamp "2171-11-05 22:00:00" ??? The int-to-char > conversion works well ("2004 12 17") but the to_timestamp() doesn't work > as expected - why?
to_char() is returning a leading space: test=> SELECT 'x' || to_char(20041217, '9999 99 99') || 'y'; ?column? --------------- x 2004 12 17y The leading space is confusing to_timestamp(): test=> SELECT to_timestamp(' 2004 12 17', 'YYYY MM DD'); to_timestamp --------------------- 2171-11-06 06:00:00 You can tell to_timestamp() to account for the leading space or you can tell to_char() to suppress it: test=> SELECT to_timestamp(to_char(20041217, '9999 99 99'), ' YYYY MM DD'); to_timestamp ------------------------ 2004-12-17 00:00:00-07 test=> SELECT to_timestamp(to_char(20041217, 'FM9999 99 99'), 'YYYY MM DD'); to_timestamp ------------------------ 2004-12-17 00:00:00-07 -- Michael Fuhr http://www.fuhr.org/~mfuhr/ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org