Parse a date from unformatted text in SQL
I'm trying to figure out an elegant way to get a date from a text column that has data like this "YYYYMMDD"...so we might see "20060508" as a value in the column, which I would like to be able to return from a query as a date (May 8, 2006).

I'm sure I can hack something together given enough time, but the approaches I'm thinking of seem pretty kludgy, and I suspect there's a way this can be elegantly done in a single query.

Any suggestions?


Parse a date from unformatted text in SQL
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I'm trying to figure out an elegant way to get a date from a text column that has data like this "YYYYMMDD"...so we might see "20060508" as a value in the column, which I would like to be able to return from a query as a date (May 8, 2006).

I'm sure I can hack something together given enough time, but the approaches I'm thinking of seem pretty kludgy, and I suspect there's a way this can be elegantly done in a single query.

Any suggestions?

