Display Date as May 1st of 2011 Oracle SQL

Question

I have a date column with several dates, I needed the query to display the date as

- January 1st of 1999 -

with the dashes.

Could anyone help?

Thank you

Answer 1

You can put fixed values in the date format mask by enclosing them in double quotes :

with t as (select date '1999-01-01' as dt from dual)
select to_char(dt, 'fm"-" Month ddth "of" YYYY "-"')
from t;

TO_CHAR(DT,'FM"-"MONTHDDTH"OF"YYYY"-"')
---------------------------------------
- January 1st of 1999 -                 

Or to show today's date:

select to_char(sysdate, 'fm"-" Month ddth "of" YYYY "-"') from dual;

TO_CHAR(SYSDATE,'FM"-"MONTHDDTH"OF"YYYY"-"')        
-----------------------------------------------------
- October 2nd of 2013 -                               

The fm 'fill mode' modifier stops it padding the month name out with spaces, and removes the leading zero you'd normally get from dd .

The double-quotes are actually optional around the dashes since they're allowed anyway ( 'fm- Month ddth "of" YYYY -' works fine too), but in this case I'd probably quote them anyway to show they're unusual.