Sybernet / Supplied Functions Reference
Release 3.00
Oct 14, 2002

HTTP.DATETIME

This function returns a valid date from a string. datetime recognizes three basic styles of date input. Each of the date formats shown below must be enclosed in quotes when it is used, and may be follwed by a time specification.

The month is entered in alphabetic format.

- Month can be a 3-character abbreviation, or the full month name, as given in the specification for the current language.

- Commas are optional.

- Case is ignored.

- If you specify only the last two digits of the year, values less than 50 are interpreted as "20yy", and values of 50 or greater are interpreted as "19yy".

- You must type the century only when the day is imitted, or when you need a century other than the default, as described above.

- If the day is missing, it defaults to the first day of the month.

- Valid formats for specifying the date alphabetically are:
Apr[il] [15][,] 1988
Apr[il] 15[,] [19]88
Apr[il] 1988 [15]

[15] Apr[il][,] 1988
15 Apr[il][,] [19]88
15 [19]88 apr[il]
[15] 1988 apr[il]

1988 APR[IL] [15]
[19]88 APR[IL] 15
1988 [15] APR[IL]

The month is entered in numeric format, in a string with slash (/), hyphen (-) or period (.) separators.

- The month, day, and year must be specified.

- The strings must be in the form:
<num> <sep> <num> <sep> <num> [ <time spec> ]
- To enter "April 15, 1988" in mdy format, you can use these formats:
[0]4/15/[19]88
[0]4-15-[19]88
[0]4.15.[19]88

Syntax

FUNCTION DATETIME
(
    VALUE                         VARCHAR2
)
RETURN DATE;

Parameters

Parameter	Description
value	A date string as described above.

Returns

A valid DATE or NULL if string is not a valid date string.

Example

The following example illustrates how to call datetime.

select http.datetime('October 17, 2002') from dual;