Re: Formatting problems with negative intervals, TO_CHAR

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