Re: Rectifying wrong Date outputs

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 6:24 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
>> <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>>>> Having said that, it's not entirely clear to me what sane behavior is
>>>> here.  Personally I would expect that an n-Ys format spec would consume
>>>> at most n digits from the input.  Otherwise how are you going to use
>>>> to_date to pick apart strings that don't have any separators?
>
>>> Yeah, seems reasonable.
>
>> On the flip side, what if you want to allow either a two digit year or
>> a four digit year?  It doesn't seem unreasonable to allow YY to
>> emcompass what YYYY would have allowed, unless there's a separate
>> notion for 'either YY or YYYY'.
>
> What I was thinking was that YYYY would take either 2 or 4 digits.
> Whatever you do here, the year will have to be delimited by a non-digit
> for such cases to be parseable.

I was assuming a slightly more general variant of that - namely, Y,
YY, or YYY would all accept that many digits, or more; and the result
of Y with 2, 3, or 4 digits would be the same as if YY, YYY, or YYYY,
respectively, had been used.

--
Robert Haas
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