On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 11:03:43PM -0800, joe.guyot wrote: > greetings all! > > > and continually get different errors: > "bad date external representation 'createdate'" > or > "bad timestamp external representation 'createdate'" > > i'm sure this has an obvious solution but i can't seem to find it. > any suggestions are appreciated.
Hmm, the parse is telling you it doesn't know how to express the string 'createdate' as a date or timestamp. Why is that? Because you've asked it to. I presume the fragments you quote above are part of a CREATE VIEW statement. You're asking forthe boolean result of comparing the substring expression to the string 'createdate'. What you probably want is: to_date(substr(creat,1,8),'YYYYMMDD') AS 'createdate' Here's an example of use: test=# CREATE VIEW quux AS SELECT to_date(substr(creat,1,8),'YYYYMMDD') AS "createdate", substr(creat,13) AS "User" FROM baz; CREATE VIEW test=# select * from baz; creat ----------------- 200111171623XYX (1 row) test=# select * from quux ; createdate | User ------------+------ 2001-11-17 | XYX (1 row) Ross ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])