Re: Possibly misleading documentation of Template Patterns for Date/Time Formatting

On Friday, April 17, 2020, David Kubecka <davidkubecka366(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> on the official docs https://www.postgresql.org/
> docs/9.6/functions-formatting.html see the table 9-24 and Pattern "Q".
> The doc (for version 9.6) says:
>
> quarter (ignored by to_date and to_timestamp)
>
> All the later versions of the doc (10, 11, 12) miss the "ignored" note
> leading the user to think that it should work but it doesn't, at least on
> 12.1:
>
> # select TO_DATE( '2012-4', 'YYYY-Q' );
> to_date
> ------------
> 2012-01-01
> (1 row)
>
> Is this an expected behaviour, i.e. the documentation is just wrong or it
> really should work?
>

It was moved to the usage notes section, and expanded to be more correct.

n to_timestamp and to_date, weekday names or numbers (DAY, D, and related
field types) are accepted but are ignored for purposes of computing the
result. The same is true for quarter (Q) fields.

David J.