you could create a table such as

TimeLabel TimeFrom TimeTo

5:06 5:06 5:07

5:07 ...

I can have several fields that are not to be aggregated, only the ID field is to be grouped and the date field is to be max(). It is unlikely...

You're right about this not being done in SQL server.

- difficulty in debugging

- difficulty in error control

I did this as an education, but probably shouldn't have due to the pressures...

Thanks to all that assisted. I had to work extra hard on this one, a simple solution just would not cut it as there was a couple of US date...

Unfortunately this failed with The conversion of a char data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range datetime value.

One of the reasons I wanted to use an...

You are right - the only thing that is consistent is the block "Period: 05/06/2002 to 03/07/2002" with the aforementioned variants on the dates. (dd/mm/yyyy, d/mm/yyyy,d/m/yyyy,dd/mm/yy etc)

Here is another input string just to show what I'm up against. I probably will do this quicker in VB, but for the exercise I thought I'd persist a bit...

Unfortunately the input text stream is not as consistent as it should be hence the different ways of pattern matching the dates. eg Period: 01/07/2002 to 28/07/2002,

Period: 01/07/02 to 28/07/02,...

You could change the value of zero to null using NULLIF then use the MIN function (which ignores null)