C#:
I want to get date time object dependent to culture specific.
Input can be in dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy.
Output should be culture specific.
If input : en-US and format of string is (dd/mm/yyyy , mm/dd/yyyy)
Output should be MM/dd/yyyy
If input : en-GB format of string is (dd/mm/yyyy , mm/dd/yyyy)
Output should be dd/MM/yyyy
Please provide solution in C# and provide only when both scenarios exists in solution
I want to get date time object dependent to culture specific.
There's no such concept. Even the calendar system isn't part of DateTime. The same DateTime value is used to represent a single value regardless of culture.
However, you can specify the culture when you format a DateTime, converting it to text. For example:
DateTime dateTime = ...;
string text = dateTime.ToString("d", culture); // d = short date format
Now if your input is in either dd/MM/yyyy or MM/dd/yyyy format, then you've fundamentally got a problem. You won't know whether 06/07/2015 is July 6th or June 7th, unless you have other information to help you. Again, if you know that it's the short date format of a specific culture, then you can use
DateTime dateTime = DateTime.ParseExact(text, "d", culture);
Related
There are many different ways of representing dates, based on the culture you're using.
Let's say I take the US date for January 2nd, 2018: "1/2/2018".
I want to make a method that returns the same value in the same culture format but with only two digits for the year component.
For example:
dd/mm/yyyy -> dd/mm/yy
mm/dd/yyyy -> mm/dd/yy
yyyy-mm-dd -> yy-mm-dd
I want to take a DateTime variable and return the same date variable in the same culture but with the year in the format yy.
Is it ok for every culture if i do something like this?
var year = mydate.ToShortDate.ToString("yy");
var date = mydate.ToShortDate.Substring(0, mydate.Count() - 4) + year;
My input will be .ToShortDate() in many cultures
There is no proper way to do this as far as I know, so the following should be considered a hack.
Let's assume that the date is held in a DateTime. How it got there is not important.
Now the task is to convert it to a string representation according to the short date format, whatever that might be, but with yyyy instead of yy.
http://www.basicdatepicker.com/samples/cultureinfo.aspx
It looks like short date formats contain either yyyy or yy in pretty much all cultures, so let's make that assumption.
The conversion can now be done in this way.
var sampleDate = new DateTime(1992, 12, 31);
var formatString = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern;
var newFormatString = formatString.Replace("yyyy", "yy");
var sampleDateAsString = sampleDate.ToString(newFormatString);
If the original format string does not contain "yyyy", then the new format string will be the same as the original.
Of course you can get the ShortDatePattern for any culture, not only the current culture as shown here.
I am using the code below to check the datetime and it is working fine in my machine but once after deployment, I am getting
"String was not recognized as a valid DateTime."
Please provide me the solution to work in all machine.
DateTime date1 = DateTime.Parse("16/05"); MM/dd
string todaydate = DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd");
if (Convert.ToDateTime(todaydate) > Convert.ToDateTime(date1.ToString("MM/dd")))
{ //Logic }
Honestly, since both answer didn't satisfied me, here is my two cent..
Let's look at your code line by line;
DateTime date1 = DateTime.Parse("16/05");
DateTime.Parse uses your CurrentCulture settings by default if don't provide any IFormatProvider as a second parameter on it's overloads. That means, if your one of standard date and time patterns of your CurrentCulture includes dd/MM (or your current culture DateSeparator since / format separator has a special meaning of replace me with current culture date separator) format, this parsing operation will be successful. That means this line might throws FormatException that depends on the current culture settings.
string todaydate = DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd");
DateTime.Now returns a local current time. With it's ToString() method you try to get it's string representation with MM/dd format. BUT WAIT! You used / format specifier again and still, you didn't use any IFormatProvider. Since this format specifier replace itself with current culture date separator, your todaydate might be 05/16, 05-16 or 05.16. That's totally depends on what date separator your current culture use.
Convert.ToDateTime(todaydate)
Convert.ToDateTime method uses DateTime.Parse explicitly. That means,since you didn't provide any IFormatProvider it will be use your CurrentCulture again and it's standard date and time formats. As I said, todaydate might be 05/16, 05-16 or 05.16 as a result. But there is no guarantee that your current culture parse this string successfully because it may not have MM/dd in it's standard date and time formats. If it parse "16/05" successfully, that means it has dd/MM format, in such a case, it definitely can't have MM/dd as a standard date and time format. A culture can't parse dd/MM and MM/dd formats at the same time. In such a case, it can't know that 01/02 string should parse as 2nd January or 1st February, right?
Convert.ToDateTime(date1.ToString("MM/dd"))
Same as here. As todaydate string, this will create "05/16" (it depends on current culture date separator of course) result and still there is no guarantee to parse this successfully.
And as said in comments, there is no point to parse your string to DateTime and get it's same string representation as well.
I strongly suspect you try to compare your current date is bigger than your parsed DateTime or not, you can use DateTime.Today property to compare with it. This property gets DateTime as current date part plus midnight as time part. For example;
DateTime dt;
if(DateTime.TryParseExact("16/05", "dd/MM", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
DateTimeStyles.None, out dt))
{
if(DateTime.Today > dt)
{
// Your operation
}
}
DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact("16/05", "dd/MM", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
if (DateTime.Today > dt)
{
// your application logic
}
DateTime dt = // From whatever source
if (DateTime.Now.Ticks > dt.Ticks)
{
// Do logic
}
I'm trying to convert some DateTime values to string format yyyy-MM-dd. The problem is i only need the date but in my case model.StartDate contains both date and time. When declaring model.StartDate as string "start" looks like this: 4/1/2014 12:00:00 AM. I get this error when trying to parse:
System.FormatException was unhandled by user code Message=String was
not recognized as a valid DateTime.
My best guess is that the error occurs because string contains both Date and Time but i could be wrong. If i explore model.StartDate further i can also find Day, DayOfTheWeek etc. Is this the right approach? I just want to convert model.StartDate to string "start" with format yyyy-MM-dd.
Heres my code:
string start = model.StartDate.ToString();
model.StartDate = DateTime.ParseExact(start, "yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
string end = model.EndDate.ToString();
model.EndDate = DateTime.ParseExact(end, "yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
Dunno what the problem is, might be that start contains time? I have no idea.
The model.StartDate and model.EndDate are DateTime properties from the view model:
[NopResourceDisplayName("Admin.GAStatistics.GAStatistics.StartDate")]
[UIHint("DateNullable")]
public DateTime? StartDate { get; set; }
[NopResourceDisplayName("Admin.GAStatistics.GAStatistics.EndDate")]
[UIHint("DateNullable")]
public DateTime? EndDate { get; set; }
EDIT:
Iv'e uploaded a image here showing the actual output i'm getting in the debugger:
https://imageshack.com/i/1n51u2p
Thank you
You are converting the dates to string but you don't specify the format. Try
string start = model.StartDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd);
ToString() uses the current thread's Culture format to convert the date to a string, including the time. The format used is G, the general date and time format.
Just for this format, you don't need to specify CultureInfo.InvariantCulture because there isn't anything culture specific. A common gotcha with the yyyy/MM/dd format though is that some cultures use - as the date specifier, and / is the date placeholder. In such a case you would have to use:
string start = model.StartDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd,CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
UPDATE
From the comments, it seems that model.StartDate and model.EndDate are not DateTime objects but strings with a specific format that include a time element.
What you are actually trying to do is parse the original string to a DateTime object, then format this object to the new format string:
var date=DateTime.ParseExact(model.StartDate,"M/d/YYYY HH:mm:ss tt",
CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
model.StartDate=date.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd",CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
assuming the string the value "4/1/2014 12:00:00 AM" for April 1, 2014
You appear to be misunderstanding how ParseExact works (or actually what it does). Parsing, in general, is the process of taking data of type X and converting it to type Y - in the context of DateTime this means converting a date string to a DateTime instance. This is completely different to what you are trying to do which is formatting a DateTime instance.
Given you already have the date you don't need to parse anything, all you need to do is format the date
model.StartDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
CultureInfo.InvariantCulture is important when working with fixed formats because you want to make sure you aren't culture aware i.e. the format you specify is exactly how you want it to display in all cultures.
Use the .Date property of a DateTime to get only the Date part. Your ToString() will also yield different results based on the current culture meaning that while your ToString() and then TryParse might work for you right now, it will break in other countries.
You can use ToString() overload to specify a specific format. Different formats can be found here
I have a date that is entered through the system (from a database) as dd/mm/yy I need to programmatically convert the date to en-US format to mm/dd/yyyy so that I can do some date calculations within the code. The code that I have so far is:
String myJames = "25/04/13" // Date String comes in as non-US date
String myJames2 = System.DateTime.Today.ToString(myJames); // I think the problem is here
DateTime d1 = Convert.ToDateTime(myJames2);
DateTime d2 = DateTime.Now;
TimeSpan t = d2 - d1;
double NrOfDays = t.TotalDays;
I know this is not completely correct, especially in the first few lines. Any help getting the dates into one en-US format for effective comparisons would be greatly appreciated.
Just to check I understand your question. You have a date as a string and you want to convert that string into a datetime so you can use it in a calculation? And your problem is that the string isn't in the format that the locale the code is running in would use?
In which case use DateTime.ParseExact.
DateTime d1 = DateTime.ParseExact(myJames,"dd/MM/yy");
This line of code would replace your line declaring and assigning d1. The line assigning to myJames2 can be removed as it isn't needed.
Everytime you convert from or to a string, culturesettings are involved.
So.. if you are converting a DateTime to string, and your culture is en-US, it will automatically converted to: MM/dd/YYYY.
This is also true for converting back. If you convert a string back to a DateTime, the culturesettings are used to see what format the string is in.
Teh culture settings are always: Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.
Most conversion functions allow to override the format (like "MM/dd/yyyy") and/or the culture. So you can create your own culture and use this during conversions.
You say the database uses dd/MM/yy, but normaly a DateTime in a database is not formatted, it is just a binary value. Or is it stored as a text? If it is stored as a text, than you should ALWAYS convert it to a DateTime using the correct culture or format.
I want to convert datetime.now format which is "dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM" to US time format i.e. "mm-dd-yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM". More over i want the converted format as datetime not in string because the same is being stored in the database and the field in the database is in datetime format so it will not take string.Please suggest....
A DateTime value doesn't have a format. DateTime.Now doesn't have a format, and if you do any kind of conversion, if you've got a DateTime, there's no format. The concept of a format only applies when you're converting to or from a string - and DateTime.Now is a DateTime, not a string.
Just insert the value into the database using DateTime.Now (or DateTime.UtcNow) and you'll preserve the data which is the important part.
You should only perform string conversions when you actually have to - at which point you can use DateTime.TryParseExact and DateTime.ToString using custom date/time format strings. (Use TryParseExact for user input; for machine input which really should be valid, use DateTime.ParseExact.)
Note that it's usually a good idea to use custom date/time patterns with the invariant culture, or standard date/time patterns with "real" cultures (e.g. the user's culture).
Try this. Standard Date and Time Format Strings
DateTime.Now.ToString("g",CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-us"))
DateTime usDateTimeFormat = DateTime.Parse(DateTime.Now ,
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-us"));