Fix handling of BC years in to_date/to_timestamp.

Previously, a conversion such as
	to_date('-44-02-01','YYYY-MM-DD')
would result in '0045-02-01 BC', as the code attempted to interpret
the negative year as BC, but failed to apply the correction needed
for our internal handling of BC years.  Fix the off-by-one problem.

Also, arrange for the combination of a negative year and an
explicit "BC" marker to cancel out and produce AD.  This is how
the negative-century case works, so it seems sane to do likewise.

Continue to read "year 0000" as 1 BC.  Oracle would throw an error,
but we've accepted that case for a long time so I'm hesitant to
change it in a back-patch.

Per bug #16419 from Saeed Hubaishan.  Back-patch to all supported
branches.

Dar Alathar-Yemen and Tom Lane

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16419-d8d9db0a7553f01b@postgresql.org

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml
index 258c5bed21f..043c2f841e1 100644
--- a/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml
+++ b/doc/src/sgml/func.sgml
@@ -5933,8 +5933,18 @@ SELECT regexp_matches('abc01234xyz', '(?:(.*?)(\d+)(.*)){1,1}');
 
      <listitem>
       <para>
-       The <literal>YYYY</literal> conversion from string to <type>timestamp</type> or
-       <type>date</type> has a restriction when processing years with more than 4 digits. You must
+       In <function>to_timestamp</function> and <function>to_date</function>,
+       negative years are treated as signifying BC.  If you write both a
+       negative year and an explicit <literal>BC</literal> field, you get AD
+       again.  An input of year zero is treated as 1 BC.
+      </para>
+     </listitem>
+
+     <listitem>
+      <para>
+       In <function>to_timestamp</function> and <function>to_date</function>,
+       the <literal>YYYY</literal> conversion has a restriction when
+       processing years with more than 4 digits. You must
        use some non-digit character or template after <literal>YYYY</literal>,
        otherwise the year is always interpreted as 4 digits. For example
        (with the year 20000):