RE: Error on update in SQL

["McCallion, Martin" <martin.mccallion@xxxxxxxxx>]

Loyd Goodbar wrote:

> This works with a date datatype
>
> update spendmsa set
> asofdate = '2000-'||strip(char(month(asofdate)))||'-'||
> strip(char(day(asofdate)))

I'm interested in this, because I had to do some complicated hacking on
an SQL date field just yesterday.  I had to initialise an eight-byte
character field with a date in the form YYYYMMDD, using the curdate()
function to get the current date.  I was trying to use
char(year(curdate())), char(month(curdate())) and char(day(curdate()))
concatenated together, but the result was too long.  According to the
InfoCenter, year() etc return long integers.

So I tried using strip() (or trim()) to remove the leading zeros, which
I assume is what you are doing above; but you don't seem to specify '0'
as the character to strip.  And of course, for months before October and
days before the tenth, the results are not what you want.

I had to use a series of substring operations, but a solution like the
above would have been neater; so what am I not getting?

TIA

Cheers,

Martin.

--
Martin McCallion
Senior Technical Consultant
Work:  martin.mccallion@misys.com
Home: martin.mccallion@ukonline.co.uk
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