Parse a date from unformatted text in SQL

Question

I\'m trying to figure out an elegant way to get a date from a text column that has data like this \"YYYYMMDD\"...so we might see \"20060508\" as a value in the column, which

Answer 1

No sweat, just CONVERT it. Style "112", or ISO would handle your example case.

SELECT CONVERT(datetime,'20060508',112)

returns

 ----------------------- 2006-05-08 00:00:00.000

 (1 row(s) affected)