Oracle Function TO_DATE

Question

I always thought that to_date function string and date format should match. Why does the following expression work?

select TO_DATE('20151014','yyyy-mm-dd') from dual;

Is oracle now ignoring special characters before converting a string to a date?

This is in Oracle 11g.

+5

mahen Oct 22 '15 at 19:39

1 answer

Gary_w · Answer 1 · 2015-10-22T20:53:31+0000

I found this interesting and asked Google, who told me that basically, when the formats do not match, Oracle tries to make it harder:

You can use the format string "FX" to match exactly:

You will learn something new every day! Thanks for asking about this!