On 27 August 2011 14:29, Jeff MacDonald <j...@zoidtechnologies.com> wrote: > Greetings, > > On Thursday, August 25, 2011 05:39:09 AM Dean Rasheed wrote: >> As background, I have an app that accepts user text input and casts it >> to a timestamp in order to produce reports. I use PostgreSQL's >> timestamp input conversion for this, since it gives a lot of >> flexibility, and can parse pretty much anything the users throw at it. >> >> It is also handy that it recognizes special case values like "now", >> "today", "tomorrow" and "yesterday". However, I can't see any way of >> entering more general relative timestamps like "5 days ago" or "2 >> hours from now". >> > > Years ago I wrapped 'getdate.y' from the CVS source code and made it into a > python extension. It handles "+2 hours" or "next week", etc. I don't know much > of anything about making pg contrib modules, but it should not be hard to do. > The way it works is you pass in a string and it returns the unix timestamp. > > [...snipped...]
That sounds like a pretty good approach, and a contrib module might well be the way to go. I'm not sure how best to handle timezones though, since it's hard-coded list probably won't match the timezones PostgreSQL knows about. Maybe that doesn't matter, I'm not sure. Regards, Dean -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
