views:

117

answers:

2
+2  Q: 

Convert Dates

Hi, Does anyone know of an easy(built in) way to convert a string like '20081231T130000' (ICalendar I think) to DateTime in C#? Or do I need to parse the string?

+5  A: 

Try this:

DateTime when = DateTime.ParseExact("20081231T130000",
    "yyyyMMddTHHmmss",CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Aside: it is close to the format used in xml, but not quite close enough - otherwise XmlConvert wraps this:

DateTime when = XmlConvert.ToDateTime("2008-12-31T13:00:00");
Marc Gravell
Once again thanks Marc.
+2  A: 

This seemed to work:

string dateTimeString = "20080115T115959";
string format = "yyyyMMddTHHmmss";
IFormatProvider us = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US", true);

DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact(dateTimeString, format, us);
Andy White
The hh should be HH to use a 24 hour clock.
Jon Skeet
Needs to be HH (0-23), not hh (0-11) - and invariant would probably do just fine since there is no culture-specific info in the string.
Marc Gravell
Thanks for catching that... I guess that's why I'm only at 11 reputation :)
Andy White
Virtual +1 for the HH comments to Jon and Marc. I've just spent an hour thinking "that worked this morning" ... :)
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