I have a script in which I am writing functions and procedures. The script works absolutely fine in Oracle SQL developer without any errors or warnings. This script I have to provide to a client side customer. The customer user runs the same script in TOAD
and he gets the error message
ORA-01830: date format picture ends before converting entire input string
In this situation, I really don't know how to handle such errors. Is this a bug in TOAD
?
I use to_date
and to_timestamp
in my functions and there I get an error.
You're either relying on implicit date conversions or implicit format models; since you said you're using
to_date
andto_timestamp
it seems to be the latter. You haven't shown your code but the error implies you're calling those functions with a string value in the format you expect to see, but not explicitly providing the format model as the second argument to the function. That will cause the session's NLS_DATE_FORMAT setting to be used. If you do:then you are really effectively doing:
You cannot control how your customer will have their NLS environment configured, and so you should never rely on implicit conversions or NLS assumptions.
As it says in the documentation:
You can see how this affects a simple query with this:
For the same reason you should avoid month names as their interpretation depends on the NLS_DATE_LANGUAGE; though you can at least override that at query level if you really have to.
You might also want to consider date and timestamp literals if you're working with fixed values:
but if you're constructing the string to convert to a date then that won't be appropriate.