I don't understand exactly what are your problem.
In the beginning of your email, you said that you want to convert a text to
timestamp, which can be done like this:
select 'Tue Sep 24 08:56:18 + 2013'::timestamp
-- 2013-09-24 08:56:18
What you refer as "meaningless parts" are day of week an
To convert a string to date I need to omit meaningless parts. I found
this format working well (Twitter dump format):
SELECT to_timestamp(
'Tue Sep 24 08:56:18 + 2013',
'xxx Mon DD HH24:MI:SS x '
)
-- 2013-09-24 08:56:18-07
In place of "xxx" I can use any non-reserved symbols, e.g
