C# How to parse a string of date in an arbitrary specified Oracle date format?

Question

How to parse a string of date in an arbitrary specified Oracle date format in C#?

So... the oracle format string is a bit different from the C# datetime format string, so I can't use that format-string as an argument for the parse. I am using Devart/CoreLab but their OracleDate.Parse seems to be really strange and not working for me. How can I parse it correctly? Do I have to call a query to the db with a TO_DATE/TO_CHAR just to get a conversion? Or that I have to map each oracle format string element into a C# format string element?

edit: And the format string of Oracle and C# are different, such as MON instead of MMM...

edit2: more clarification: Basically I would have strings that are oracle-date-in-string, e.g. "08-OCT-85", and I am also able to get the oracle format pattern that these date string is following, such as "DD-MON-YY", "DD-MON-RR", "YYYY/RM/DD"... etc

I would like to be able to parse them into a C# DateTime properly so that I can set them to Parameter (which expects C# DateTime), and the problem is these oracle-date-format-pattern is not the same as the C# DateTime-parse-format-pattern.

I suspect somewhere out there might exist some function that can do something like DateTime dt = ParseDatestringWithSpecifiedOracleDatePatternIntoCSharpDateTime("08-OCT-85", "DD-MON-YY); right? But I can't find it yet :(

Answer 1

Could you use DateTime.TryParseExact() with a given format string?

Answer 2

DateTime.TryParseExact allows you do pass a format string to exactly define the format (or an array of formats to try in turn).