On May 19, 2010, at 4:31 AM, Mike Fowler wrote:
Pavel Stehule wrote:
2010/5/19 Peter Eisentraut <pete...@gmx.net>:
On tis, 2010-05-18 at 18:26 -0400, Ben Hockey wrote:
ecmascript 5 is the most recent specification for JavaScript and i
would think that having a DATESTYLE format to simplify
interoperability with JavaScript applications would be highly
desirable.
Note that we haven't got any other datestyles that are intended to
support interoperability with some language. It is usually the
job of
the client driver to convert PostgreSQL data (plural of datum) to
the
appropriate type and format for the client environment or
language. Is
there any reason why JavaScript would be different?
I wouldn't be keen to see dedicated language specific handling of
date/datetime formats. It would lead to an explosion of functions
with new languages needing adding as and when their users jumped up
and down on us. However a generic format could be very useful and
would give the opportunity for people who need a language specific
short cut the opportunity to do a CREATE FUNCTION wrapping the
generic one with a hard coded format specifier.
Other platforms have generic support for this kind of task, for
example SQLServer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187928.aspx
. I wouldn't recommend the SQLServer way, I think numeric format
specifiers are clumsy. Perhaps a mechanism like Java which is nicely
summarized here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html
i think that http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/#Date_Format_Patterns is
very similar to (maybe the same as) the java simple date format but
the unicode link gives a more complete explanation of exactly how the
formatters will be interpreted - ie y will represent the full
representation of the year but yy will represent the 2 digit form of
the year, etc.. just thought i'd share the reference since it
provides a powerful way to generically specify date formats and is
possibly something that many people might already be familiar with.
thanks for looking into adding this feature. custom formats for
parsing and formatting of dates would certainly be the better option
if it can be done securely.
thanks,
ben..
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