Converting a date in MySQL from string field

Question

I'm using a system where the dates are stored as strings in the format dd/mm/yyyy. Is it possible to convert this to yyyy-mm-dd in a SELECT query (so that I can use DATE_FORMAT on it)? Does MySQL have a date parsing function?

Currently the only method I can think of is to concatenate a bunch of substrings, but hopefully there's a simpler solution.

(Unfortunately I can't convert the field to a true date field since it's a meta-table: the same column contains values for different fields that are just strings.)

Answer 1

This:

STR_TO_DATE(t.datestring, '%d/%m/%Y')

...will convert the string into a datetime datatype. To be sure that it comes out in the format you desire, use DATE_FORMAT:

DATE_FORMAT(STR_TO_DATE(t.datestring, '%d/%m/%Y'), '%Y-%m-%d')

If you can't change the datatype on the original column, I suggest creating a view that uses the STR_TO_DATE call to convert the string to a DateTime data type.