Re: CAST and timestamp

> Keith Worthington  writes:
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Try casting the inputs to type "text" and then to timestamp or real.
> 
> > Are you saying that I should try something like
> > CAST( CAST( quantity AS text ) AS float4) AS quantity
> 
> Right.  (In the cases where you were concatenating, do that inside 
> the first cast.)
> 
> BTW, Postgres hackers would tend to write the above as
> 
> 	quantity::text::float4
> 
> which is not SQL-spec notation but sure saves a lot of typing.
> 
> 			regards, tom lane

Hi All,

My final comment on this thread.  (That will hopefully benefit someone
searching the archives.)

When concatenating strings and CASTing them to a timestamp it appears to be
necessary to concatenate whitespace in between the data and time portions.

This works just fine.
CAST( CAST( scan_date || ' ' || scan_time AS text) AS timestamp)

This generates an error.
CAST( CAST( scan_date || scan_time AS text) AS timestamp)
ERROR:  Bad timestamp external representation '20041220160933'

Kind Regards,
Keith

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