UPDATE This looks to be a bug in Windows 7. I tested the same scenario with Windows 8 and I cannot replicate this there. Please see the MS Bug Report that I posted on this issue if you want more information. Thank you again to all that helped.
UPDATE 2 The error happens on Server 2008 R2 as well (Kind of expected that)
Original Submission
Using the examples on the following page Date Formats I am able to control the format of my date. However, one of my clients, using Windows 7, modified their calendar to display their short date like this 'ddd MM/dd/yy', see the image for the settings. .
This displays the clock like this .
This works fine except when I use a date on their machine. When I format the date like the following...
String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yy}", dt); //the result is 06 04 13, notice the spaces
If I take off the ddd to display the day of week in the calendar settings and use the same format option I see the following...
String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yy}", dt); //the result is 06/04/13, this time it has forward slashes
The .ToShortDateString() option on the date gives me "Tue 06/04/13" and crashes when going into a database. This is how the issue was found.
Outside of hard coding the format, i.e. joining the month to the forward slash to the day etc, does anyone know of what else I can try to get this to work?
It sounds like you are formatting the date as a string in order to send it in via some SQL. Have you considered using command parameters for this instead of string formatting?
Using the InvariantCulture should work. I created a test console app to check it. The code changes the thread's current culture to be the Invariant one:
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
/// Displays '06 04 13'
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0:MM/dd/yy}", System.DateTime.Now));
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;
/// Displays '06/04/13'
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0:MM/dd/yy}", System.DateTime.Now));
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
Edited To Note: This looks to be a bug with Windows 7. When changing the short date pattern via the control panel, using the "additional settings" tab as in the OP's post, both the CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture's date separator gets changed as well.
When you modify the short date format, it looks like the first non-format character is picked up as the date separator for the current culture. Both CurrentCulture and CUrrentUiCulture are modified to reflect that [unintended] customization. Looks like some [bright] developer made the [unwarranted] assumption that nobody would ever have a short date format that included something like day of the week.
Nice catch! Are you going to report the bug to Microsoft?
If you use the invariant culture to format dates, etc., user settings won't affect you. Try something like
String.Format( CultureInfo.InvariantCulture , "{0:MM/dd/yy}", dt);
or use an instance of the culture you want:
CultureInfo usa = CultureInfo.GetCultureINfo("en-US") ;
string.Format( usa , "{0:MM/dd/yy}" , dt ) ;
However, if the culture you specified matches the current culture set for the Windows OS, user customizations are applied: meaning, you'll have the same problem unless you use a culture that isn't the current windows culture.
More details at MDSN:
CultureInfo
Standard DateTime Format Strings
Custom DateTime Format Strings
Without specifying a specific culture, you'll get the current user's CurrentCulture or CurrentUICulture with any user-specified mods applied to it.
For those interested in more information on this please go to the MS Forums post that I put HERE.
Related
I'm facing a very strange issue. I'm writing to a CSV file like this:
sw.WriteLine($"{posting.publishedOn},{posting.ExpirationDate}");
Posting Date is a DateTime object and Expiration Date is a DateTime? object.
However, when I run this on my production server in Germany, it's very inconsistent as to which date format it prints out. Sometimes I will have dates formatted like this (European style):
Posting Date,Expiration Date
06.08.2018 11:49,08.07.2018 11:49
And sometimes I will have dates formatted like this (U. S. style):
Posting Date,Expiration Date
8/15/2018 7:56:12 AM,10/14/2018 7:56:12 AM
Posting Date and Expiration Date are completely separate .NET Objects, but each line will be consistent - i.e. if one column is in European format, the other one will be as well.
I tried setting the culture like this:
CultureInfo.DefaultThreadCurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
but it didn't seem to make a difference.
This happens when I run the console application on my server in Germany.
What could be causing this? Is there a way to fix it without having to explicitly call ToString with a format every time I write a date?
Set the format explicitly, for example:
sw.WriteLine($"{posting.publishedOn.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm tt")},{posting.ExpirationDate?.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm tt")??""}");
EDIT: Just realized you explicitly said you don't want this solution. I'm going to leave my answer in case others find your question and ToString is a suitable solution.
Are you absolutely sure that the serialization is always happening in the same thread whose culture is being set?
Because if not, that may be the issue.
Just to debug it, please set the current thread culture immediately before the serialization code and check if the issue still happens, i.e.
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
sw.WriteLine($"{posting.publishedOn},{posting.ExpirationDate}");
I believe you need to just set the specific culture like so:
CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("en-US");
I have a console application written in C# that makes use of DateTime.Now. With the Windows Region set to "English (United States)", the short date output is M/d/yyyy. I have an instance of my application running on a machine with the culture format set to "English (Canada)" and the short date format set to dd/MM/yyyy. Since I want consistency within my application across different servers, I changed the short date format in Windows' Region settings to M/d/yyyy. However, my application is still outputting DateTime.Now as dd/MM/yyyy. Is there something else that needs to be changed for my application to output in the format I specified?
I do this in various places but here is an example:
TimeZoneInfo customTimeZone = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById("Eastern Standard Time");
DateTime thisTime = TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime(DateTime.Now, customTimeZone);
//The below output is not formatted how the Windows Region short date is specified.
Console.Writeline(thisTime);
In this case, my DateTime is not formatted how its specified in the Windows Region settings.
You can change the culture of the current thread as follows on application start. This affects the date format, currency format, etc.
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
See MSDN: Globalization for more information (see section on Dates and Times).
If you can handle the date being as a string, I don't recommand you use the settings to get past this problem. You should use something like this :
DateTime.Now.ToString("MM\/dd\/yyyy")
This way you have full control over the output independently of region settings.
First, a little correction to the answer by #phadaphunk: the line
DateTime.Now.ToString("MM\/dd\/yyyy");
will cause an error: 'unrecognized escape sequence'. So, it can be corrected as
DateTime.Now.ToString(#"MM\/dd\/yyyy");
The more general way to specify the DateTime format as detailed in MSDN article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4%28v=vs.110%29.aspx would be the following:
String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yyyy}",DateTime.Now);
with CultureInfo.InvariantCulture explicitly specified as suggested by #Joe, or thread-specific CurrentCulture set to CultureInfo("en-US") as suggested by #async.
Hope this will help. Best regards,
I have a datetime in this format "Wednesday, December 04, 2013". I want to translate it to different cultures at runtime so that i am able to store that in database according to culture.
This is my code:
dysMngmt.Day = curntDate.ToString("D");
The one line code above is getting the day.
So,please help me.
You can use the second argument of the ToString function, which enables you to pick a culture you see fit:
curntDate.ToString("D", CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-US"))
As a side note, why are you saving the date in your database as a string? Why not use a native date date type? It will take less space and allow you comparisons etc., and then you'd just use the currect culture when reading it out of the database.
Unless you have a very good reason for handling the culture of each date seperatly within the application you should set this at the application level so that the default ToString() works with your intended culture.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306162
Also, you should probably also not store dates as text in your database.
Frustrating problem with DateTime, we have a section with a date picker on and if the culture is set to en-GB and the date is 01/11/2012 (dd/mm/yyyy) and then the culture is swapped to Chinese (zh-CN) the date is passed in the old culture format and when it is converted to a DateTime the datetime becomes 2012/1/11 when the culture should be (yyyy/mm/dd).
This seems to be the only culture that I have come across where the conversion is going wrong as it should be 2012/11/1 as 11 is the month.
Does anyone have any ideas why it isn't converting correctly?
Sorry guys this is my fault for not being clear enough, more detail needed.
We have a reporting form that allows users to select a date range, on that form we use use a date range picker (http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/update_date_range_picker_with_jquery_ui/) to populate a readonly textbox that is submitted to filter the results. Users can select from a dropdown their current culture (needed for our users as they wanted to easily swap between English and Chinese without changing browser settings, If the culture is en-GB then the date range string may read "01/01/2012---01/11/2012" which is 1st January 2012 - 1st November 2012. This is stored in the url, e.g: &DateRange=01%2F01%2F2012+---+01%2F11%2F2012.
Now if the user swaps to Chinese it calls the current page with all the same query parameters but also with the culture parameter changed (we allow the culture to be overridden by an URL parameter) which means the dateformat 01/11/2012 is in the query string, when we pass this using:
DateTime.TryParse(endDateString, out endDate);
the DateTime object contains a date of 11th January 2012 instead of 1st November 2012.
Is there a way I could store the culture info that the date string is in and use that to convert to the new culture info if the culture is swapped?
Any better ideas would be greatly appreciated, swapping from en-GB to en-IN (India) seems to work fine as does swapping to es-MX (Mexico). It just seems to be chinese but that could be pot luck based on these languages date formats.
Many thanks for taking the time to read this.
DateTime.TryParse(endDateString, out endDate);
is using whatever culture is default on the server.
The basic solution would be:
var ci = GetCultureInfoFromRequest();
DateTime.TryParse(endDateString, out endDate, ci);
Use strings to move datetime around in such cases, if you are not processing datetime and just storing it.After that you can change the format before storing it in the database.
I want to display some rows of data on a web page where one column is a DateTime.
I want the date format to be displayed based on the current thread culture.
Right now, I'm doing this (dt is a DateTime):
string s = dt.ToString(Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat);
It's working well, however, on some culture, months and days are represented as only one digit (hours too), for example:
8/8/2011 8:57:59 AM
I would like the date to be displayed like this:
08/08/2011 08:57:59 AM
It would be easier to read (and prettier) when there's a list of rows.
I saw that there's a String.format method I could use, but that makes the current culture irrelevant.
Is there a way to achieve what I'm trying to do?
The solution provided here might be useful.
I see only a single solution - you should obtain the current culture display format, patch it so that it meets your requirement and finally format your DateTime value using the patched format string.
Make a custom culture.
Base it on the current thread culture.
Modify the settings you want to override.
Then either set it back into the thread as the culture or use it temporarily during the format operation.
We currently do this to format all dates in an internationally unambiguous form ddMMMyyyy where MMM is only English three-letter abbreviations, yet obey local numeric formatting rules ./, etc.
The relevant properties to override would be here.
If you want to show it based on the current culture, then what is the problem? If you want a specific format, you have to specify that.
string text = myDateTime.ToString("{0:[your format]}");
I believe this defaults to the server format - but what if you try specifying "u" as the format code which will put the year first then I think two digits.
You can use
String.Format("{0:dd/MM/yyyy hh:MM PM ", yourDatetime)
The date separator / (slash) and time sepatator : (colon) will be rewritten to characters defined in the current DateTimeFormatInfo.DateSeparator and DateTimeFormatInfo.TimeSeparator.
EDIT: Forgot to add object param needed to the string.format
using System.Globalization;
private static CultureInfo defaultCulture = new CultureInfo("nl-NL");
public static CultureInfo GetCurrentCulture()
{
List<CultureInfo> badCultures = new List<CultureInfo>();
badCultures.Add(new CultureInfo("en-US"));
if (badCultures.Contains(System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture))
return defaultCulture;
return System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
}