Question

I want to create a function, which has a paramater ( a string which contains a date ) and then the function converts it and returns it. In our company we have workstations with three different languages. We have hungarian, english and german workstations too. I want to read a date from the registry, but this date will be written into the registry according to the current regional setting.

So if the regional setting is hungarian, then date written to date registry is 2012.01.25 (YYY.MM.DD), but if i change the regional setting to german then the value written to the registry will be 25/01/2012 (MM.DD.YYYY). If i change the regional setting to english, then the value will be 01/25/2012 (DD.MM.YYYY).

Unfortunately i don’t know which regional setting was used when the date was written into the registry, because it can be changed since the value was written into the registry.

This iy why i want to create a function which gets a date, and then converts it to this format: YYYY.MM.DD. but i don’t know how to do it.

Could someone help me how to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use this expression to convert your strings to SQL type date. This expression uses the DD/MM/YYYY format only when it cannot use its default MM/DD/YYYY format.

CASE
    WHEN CHARINDEX('/', val)=5 THEN CONVERT(date,val,111)
    ELSE CONVERT(date, val, CASE WHEN LEFT(val,2) <= '12' THEN 101 ELSE 103 END)
END

This expression should be used inside a select statement. I am assuming that the name of your varchar column containing a date string is val.