Cast datetime as varchar

I stumbled upon this great Q+A on Stack Overflow when I was looking for options to cast datetime for a report. (The customer didn’t like our standard mm/dd/yyyy format.)

I actually like the third answer the most, because it gives you a chart on all the styles. A pretty helpful shortcut, if you ask me.

union select convert(nvarchar(MAX), @now, 1), 1
union select convert(nvarchar(MAX), @now, 2), 2
union select convert(nvarchar(MAX), @now, 3), 3
union select convert(nvarchar(MAX), @now, 4), 4
union select convert(nvarchar(MAX), @now, 5), 5
output, style
Apr 28 2014 9:31AM, 0
04/28/14, 1
14.04.28, 2
28/04/14, 3
28.04.14, 4
28-04-14, 5

Helpful, if you ask me, if you want to depart from your usual convert(101) format. I don’t even know why the answer is not marked correct. Check out the article here, and bookmark it for future use.

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