Sql Server string to date conversion

Question

I want to convert a string like this:

\'10/15/2008 10:06:32 PM\'

into the equivalent DATETIME value in Sql Server.

In Oracle, I wou

Answer 1

SQL Server (2005, 2000, 7.0) does not have any flexible, or even non-flexible, way of taking an arbitrarily structured datetime in string format and converting it to the datetime data type.

By "arbitrarily", I mean "a form that the person who wrote it, though perhaps not you or I or someone on the other side of the planet, would consider to be intuitive and completely obvious." Frankly, I'm not sure there is any such algorithm.