convert varchar to date format

[ciacia]

Hello , I want to wirte a sql statment which converts varchar into date (mm/dd/yyyy) format. please help thanks

[Mike Dimmick]

CAST( @var AS datetime ) works well for dates in the current DATEFORMAT or using ISO 8601 format (yyyyMMdd). The DATEFORMAT defaults to the appropriate format for the current LANGUAGE (really a locale). The default value for LANGUAGE comes from the user's login, which in turn gets it (at creation time) from the server's default language option. Otherwise look at CONVERT. As a best practice you should pass dates and indeed all other user-supplied data using parameterized queries, for which see the documentation for the provider you're using. That passes the data using a well-understood datatype, rather than parsing the information multiple times.

Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder