* Tom Lane ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Stephen Frost <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I guess my example was lacking, I'm sure there are cases where the > > text->date casting will end up being wrong or some date style won't be > > accepted. If the above was 'January 10th, 2003, October 1st, 2003, > > January 1st, 2003', for example. Thinking back I think that might have > > been the situation I was thinking about (conflicting mdy and dmy) and > > would have made more sense as an example. > > Then what are you after, some magically prescient input mode that will > guess the correct interpretation?
No, I'm interested, as I discussed in my message[1], in the ability to use functions in a copy statement to allow me to specify the conversion from text to the appropriate data type. Right now Postgres is using casting which can end up being wrong. That's not a fault or something that can be fixed, the casting logic itself is fine but it's not always appropriate to apply the same casting to all fields of a given type. It would be nice to be able to choose what function is used and to pass arguments to it. This is a feature request and I'm not suggesting a change in host the text->date casting is done. From a programmatical standpoint I see things like this: Right now: text -> date : cast(text as date) text -> numeric : cast(text as numeric) I want to be able to pop that out and put my own function in place of it, like so: text -> date : to_date(text,'YYYY-Mon-DD') text -> numeric : to_numeric(text,'99V99') My other message had an example syntax to do this. I don't know if that'd be the appropriate syntax or not but I thought it illustrated what I was interested in. Thanks, Stephen [1] http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2003-11/msg01456.php
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