Re: Allow to_date() and to_timestamp() to accept localized names

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> On 2020-Jan-22, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Arthur Zakirov <zaartur@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Shouldn't we just show all remaining string instead of truncating it? 

>> That would avoid a bunch of arbitrary decisions, for sure.
>> Anybody have an objection?

> I think it would be clearer to search for whitespace starting at the
> start of the bogus token and stop there.  It might not be perfect,
> particularly if any language has whitespace in a month etc name (I don't
> know any example but I guess it's not impossible for it to exist;
> Portuguese weekday names maybe?), but it seems better than either of the
> behaviors shown above.

I'm okay with that.  It won't work so well for cases like
"1-Januzry-1999", but it's still better than what happens now:

regression=# select to_date('1-Januzry-1999', 'DD MONTH YYYY');
ERROR:  invalid value "Januzry-1" for "MONTH"

That particular case could be improved by stopping at a dash ... but
since this code is also used to match strings like "A.M.", we can't
just exclude punctuation in general.  Breaking at whitespace seems
like a reasonable compromise.

            regards, tom lane