Re: A creepy story about dates. How to prevent it?

On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 02:43:12 -0500,
> Ron Johnson <ron(dot)l(dot)johnson(at)cox(dot)net> wrote:
> >
> > OTOH, Andrew Snow's method (alway use ANSI standard YYYY-MM-DD)
> > is guaranteed to work. Have your app convert to that format before
> > inserting, and then PostgreSQL is guaranteed to puke if there's
> > a problem.
>
> No it isn't. In 7.4:
> area=> select '2003-20-02'::date;
> date
> ------------
> 2003-02-20
> (1 row)

If the application always passes the date to Postgres with the three-letter
month name where appropriate, and use the 4-digit year, it should be
comparatively bulletproof. At least, bulletproof in its interpretation --
the application can always garble things.

Not sure how this translates in different languages, though.

-frank