Getting around the 'ORA-01840: input value not long enough for date format' error

An issue has been brought to my attention recently that was to do with the to_date function returning an ORA-01840 error for certain values. This prompted an investigation which ultimately proved that it was a data issue, however I decided to put together a workaround for future reference anyway.

The error being thrown was:

Error

ORA-01840: input value not long enough for date format

01840. 00000 - "input value not long enough for date format"

That's fairly straight forward, it just means that the date I am trying to convert doesn't have enough precision for the format that I am trying to convert it to. The SQL below demonstrates this...

SQL

select to_date('2016', 'YYYYMMDDHH24MISS')

from dual;

Interestingly the error disappears when I add a month and day to my date value i.e. 20160101 is OK even though my format expects hours, minutes and seconds too.

My workaround takes advantage of the above find by padding the date up to 8 characters (yyyymmdd) as required. It consists of two rpad operations, one for the day and one for the month to cater for inputs of the 'yyyy' and 'yyyymm' formats.

This is the end result...

SQL

select to_date(rpad(rpad('2016', 6, '01'), 8, '01'), 'YYYYMMDDHH24MISS')

from dual;

It's not the best solution but will get you out of a bind if you really need to pad dates like this.

-i