Switching Characters

[ChrisP]

I've got a text string like a date eg 01-Jan-2001, is there a neat way
in an SQL statement to replace Jan with 01, Feb with 02 etc?

[Aggro]

ChrisP wrote:

I've got a text string like a date eg 01-Jan-2001, is there a neat way
in an SQL statement to replace Jan with 01, Feb with 02 etc?

I'm not sure, but you can check if you find what you like from string
functions:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/String_functions.html

Or if you have MySQL 4.1.1 you might want to use some date functions
like STR_TO_DATE() and DATE_FORMAT().

One thing I can't understand. Why do you people save date as string to
database? Wouldn't it be easier to save it as DATE format, which would
allow much easier ways to format it to any string format and it would be
easier to change it also.

[Aggro]

ChrisP wrote:

I've got a text string like a date eg 01-Jan-2001, is there a neat way
in an SQL statement to replace Jan with 01, Feb with 02 etc?

I'm not sure, but you can check if you find what you like from string
functions:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/String_functions.html

Or if you have MySQL 4.1.1 you might want to use some date functions
like STR_TO_DATE() and DATE_FORMAT().

One thing I can't understand. Why do you people save date as string to
database? Wouldn't it be easier to save it as DATE format, which would
allow much easier ways to format it to any string format and it would be
easier to change it also.