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From: Stefan Weiss <spaceman@foo.at>
Organization: Foo Orbital Operations
To: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Formatting problems with negative intervals, TO_CHAR
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 11:08:37 +0200
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	<21474.1086561656@sss.pgh.pa.us> <20040607075200.GA28529@zf.jcu.cz>
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On Monday, 07 June 2004 09:52, Karel Zak wrote:
>   http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/functions-formatting.html
>
>   Warning: to_char(interval, text) is deprecated and should not be
>   used in newly-written code. It will be removed in the next version.

This is news for me. Are there any suggestions what we should replace
TO_CHAR with? For example, we were using TO_CHAR to print timestamp
values in ISO format without milliseconds ("YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS" style), 
regardless of the current datestyle setting.

I see only three solutions to do this without using TO_CHAR, and IMO none
of them are very attractive:

 - do the formatting at the application level,
 - change the datestyle for this query only
 - an ugly construct using 6 EXTRACT functions

I hope there is a more elegant way to solve this...

Why was TO_CHAR deprecated anyway? It seemed to me like a very useful and
flexible way to do date/time formatting.


Tnx,
stefan