Returning Month (number) as char(2)

• j_maloney

  Right there with Babe

  Points: 731

  More actions

  September 7, 2011 at 4:04 pm

  #257012

  Trying to return current month as a char(2)

  Ex - July would return '07'

  I need two characters exactly ('07' instead of '7') so I figured I could append a leading '0' and then use the RIGHT() function to return the 2 end characters (see code below). Yet even with CAST or CONVERT, it's treating it like a numeric type and I'm losing the leading '0'.

  select '0' + CONVERT(char(2), month(getdate()))

  select '0' + CAST(month(getdate()) as char(2))

  select RIGHT('0' + CONVERT(char(2), month(getdate())), 2)

  select RIGHT('0' + CAST(month(getdate()) as char(2)), 2)

  Any ideas?

  TIA, JM

• j_maloney

  Right there with Babe

  Points: 731

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  September 7, 2011 at 4:09 pm

  #1378298

  Nevermind.

  Solved:

  RIGHT() is supposed to return varchar. The concatenation fails with char(2) but works when using varchar(3). I thought it would use it's own internal varchar variable to do the concatenation, but apparently not.

  Works:

  select RIGHT('0' + CONVERT(varchar(3), month(getdate())), 2)

  select RIGHT('0' + CAST(month(getdate()) as varchar(3)), 2)

• mister.magoo

  SSC-Forever

  Points: 47068

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  September 7, 2011 at 4:18 pm

  #1378300

  Thanks for sharing.

  FYI there is another way, which makes use of the US date format having month first:

  select convert(char(2),getdate(),1)

  MM
  

  ---

  
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