Help with DateTime in format I need

Question

I am working with DateTime, trying to get date in the format like this:

03.05.2010-04.05.23 that is: dd.MM.yyyy-HH.mm.ss

I'm using DateTime.ParseExact to try to achieve this (maybe wrong)

So far I have:

var dateInFormat = DateTime.ParseExact(DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString(), "dd.MM.yyyy.HH.mm.ss", null);

But can't quite get exactly what I want. Basically I want to keep the 0, for example time is 05:03:20 PM I don't want it to show like 5:3:20 PM

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Is there any problem just using ToString()? Eg:

Console.WriteLine(dateInFormat.ToString("dd.MM.yyyy-HH.mm.ss"));

Answer 2

If you have a date as DateTime (not string) then you can format it as leppie indicates:

  string date = DateTime.Now.ToString("dd.MM.yyyy-HH.mm.ss");

If on the other hand you have a date as string in the format dd.MM.yyyy-HH.mm.ss then you can use

 string mydate = "03.05.2010-04.05.23";
 DateTime dateFromString = DateTime.ParseExact(mydate, "dd.MM.yyyy-HH.mm.ss", null);

you get the exception because your string has the wrong format (namely the systems short date format)-