converting iso varchar dates to date types in postgres

Working with date conversions in SQL can be pretty tedious. Today I was working on a data pull and needed to convert a VARCHAR type to a DAY to make things more manageable for a GROUP BY clause.

In doing so, I ran into a scenario where my dates were coming out incorrect. I noticed that the date format I used was improper, and the Postgres engine doesn't use the same shorthand for date types that I was used to.

Example:

"2022-06015 13:00:00" -> 2022-06-15

The SQL for the above conversion would be:

SELECT
    TRUNC(TO_DATE(<your-varchar-column>, 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS')) AS DAY
FROM <your-table>

Here's a reference for date types in Postgres.