The 22018 error code in PostgreSQL is associated with invalid_character_value_for_cast. This error occurs when an attempt is made to cast a character string to a specific data type but the string content is not suitable for such a conversion.
To diagnose this issue, you should examine the query where the cast is being performed. Check for any CAST operations or implicit casts that might be happening due to the assignment of values between different types.
For example, suppose you have the following table:
CREATE TABLE test_table (
some_date DATE
);And you attempt to insert an improperly formatted string into the some_date column:
INSERT INTO test_table (some_date) VALUES ('not a date');This would result in the 22018 error because 'not a date' is not a valid date string.
To fix this, you would need to ensure that the character string being cast is in the correct format for the target data type. Here’s a corrected example:
INSERT INTO test_table (some_date) VALUES ('2024-01-01');In this example, '2024-01-01' is a properly formatted date string, and the INSERT statement should succeed without an error.
Another common situation where this error may occur is when using the TO_NUMBER function to convert a string to a number, but the string contains non-numeric characters:
SELECT TO_NUMBER('123a', '9999');This will raise the 22018 error because '123a' is not a valid numeric value. To fix it, you should either correct the input string to contain only numeric characters or use a more suitable format mask that matches the input string:
SELECT TO_NUMBER('123', '9999');For more information on PostgreSQL casting and conversion functions, you might want to check the official PostgreSQL documentation on data type formatting functions.
If you encounter this error, ensure that any string being cast to another data type is an appropriate and valid representation of the target type. If necessary, you can use conditional logic or data cleaning functions to handle cases where the input data might not be in the expected format.