RE: TO_CHAR function

John (and Chuck),

It took me some time to get to Chuck's response, and, as usual, what I found is very interesting/surprising.

Here is my STRSQL script - taken from Chuck's post:

SELECT
TO_CHAR(CURRENT TIMESTAMP, 'DD-Mon-YYYY HH24:MI AM')
FROM SYSIBM/SYSDUMMY1

Here is the result:

TO_CHAR
26-Mar-2015 12:50 PM

The time format is exactly what I want; the solution I think I'll use is:

SELECT
TO_CHAR(CURRENT TIMESTAMP, 'MM/DD/YY HH24:MI AM')
FROM SYSIBM/SYSDUMMY1

Which returns:

TO_CHAR
03/26/15 13:06 PM

Chuck's example is the first I've seen where format "elements" or "tokens" are combined to get
a result I had assumed would require concat or other "assembly".

Thanks Chuck for the elegant solution, and thanks John for your timely and insightful reminder.







-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2015 12:32 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: TO_CHAR function

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 1:48 PM, Gary Thompson <gthompson@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've not done a lot of searching, but Rob's reply looks like is should work for me.

Gary, did you read Chuck's response at all?

You shouldn't have to mess with concatenation. The point of the format string is to build the template for the entire output. 'AM' is merely one possible element to put in the template, just as the year, day, hour, etc. are possible elements.

Just as 'YYYY' in the format string will be replaced by the four-digit year, and 'YY' will be replaced by the two-digit year, 'AM' will be replaced by either 'AM' if the time is before noon, or 'PM' otherwise.

I'm not saying you can't use the format string to just extract the AM/PM, but I just want to make it clear that there's nothing special about 'AM' in the format string that would make it have to appear by itself. It's just like 'MI' or 'MM' or 'DAY' or any other substitution variable in the format string.

John Y.
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