On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 02:41:32PM +1100, Brendan Jurd wrote: > My gut reaction at first was to go with the former approach. It's > programmatically more simple, and it's easier to explain in > documentation/error messages. But then it occurred to me that one of > the use cases for to_date is slurping date information out of textual > reports which may contain redundant date information. If a user > wanted to parse something like "2007-02-17 Q1", he would probably try > 'YYYY-MM-DD "Q"Q', even though this pattern is logically > over-constraining. Would it be fair to throw an error in such a case?
If that's the use case, it would seem to me reasonable to be able to mark fields for parsing but to not use them in the final calculation, like the * modifier for scanf in C. Other than that I'd follow whatever Oracle does, that seem to be the trend with those functions. Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to > litigate.
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