Oracle Date column cleaning

Question

I have a table1(DueDate varchar2(20)). It has thousands of date data in different format with some bad data like characters.

eg.

YYYYMMDD,
MM/DD/YYY         


        

Answer 1

This is one of the reasons that storing date information in a character field is such a bad idea.

The easiest option is to create a function that attempts to convert the string to a date using the formats in whatever priority order you have (i.e. is 010203 Jan 2, 2003 or Feb 3, 2001 or something else) and catches the exceptions. Something like

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION my_to_date( p_str IN VARCHAR2 )
  RETURN DATE
IS
  l_date DATE;
BEGIN
  l_date := to_date( p_str, 'YYYYMMDD' );
  RETURN l_date;
EXCEPTION
  WHEN others THEN
    BEGIN
      l_date := to_date( p_str, 'MM/DD/YYYY' );
      RETURN l_date;
    EXCEPTION 
      WHEN others
      THEN
        RETURN null;
    END;
END;

which works something like

SQL> CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION my_to_date( p_str IN VARCHAR2 )
  2    RETURN DATE
  3  IS
  4    l_date DATE;
  5  BEGIN
  6    l_date := to_date( p_str, 'YYYYMMDD' );
  7    RETURN l_date;
  8  EXCEPTION
  9    WHEN others THEN
 10      BEGIN
 11        l_date := to_date( p_str, 'MM/DD/YYYY' );
 12        RETURN l_date;
 13      EXCEPTION
 14        WHEN others
 15        THEN
 16          RETURN null;
 17      END;
 18  END;
 19  /

Function created.

SQL> select my_to_date( '19000101' ) from dual;

MY_TO_DAT
---------
01-JAN-00

SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf

  1* select my_to_date( '01/02/2005' ) from dual
SQL> /

MY_TO_DAT
---------
02-JAN-05

Of course, you'd have to code the full set of valid date formats in your code, I'm just handling the first two in your list.