String to DateTime Parsing

Question

I'm working on parsing few XML files where I have datetime values saved as text. I'm not able to find what format is the below one -

20110123T233356,00-05

I tried both DateTime.Parse and DateTimeOffset.Parse and both of them failed. I also tried to identify the string in few places like here and here with no luck.

Looks like it's yyyyMMddTHHmmss,xx-xx where xx-xx are numbers I have no idea about. What's the context? — rikitikitik, Mar 14 '14 at 09:45
I think your question is answered here. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/341175/datetime-parse-and-making-it-work-with-a-specific-format — Mehbube Arman, Mar 14 '14 at 09:47
@rikitikitik: Looks like -05 is the UTC time zone offset, so the value after the comma may be `ff`. — Carsten, Mar 14 '14 at 09:48
@MehbubeArman - I've a 'T' here. In some places I read that it refers a timezone. Is it true? — NLV, Mar 14 '14 at 09:48
@DmitryBychenko - For ParseExact I need to pass the format which I'm trying to identify. — NLV, Mar 14 '14 at 09:49
The `T` is there to separate the date from the time portion of the string. — Rik, Mar 14 '14 at 09:52
@NLV Ref [ISO 8601 on wiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Combined_date_and_time_representations) — lastr2d2, Mar 14 '14 at 09:55
Without the last part '00-05' I'm able to parse. But how to include that UTC offset too as mentioned by @Aschratt ? — NLV, Mar 14 '14 at 09:58

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 14 '14 at 09:57

8

Assuming that the ",00" is hundredths of seconds and the "-05" is the timezone, you can parse it like this:

string dateStr = "20110123T233356,00-05";
string format = @"yyyyMMdd\THHmmss\,ffzz";

DateTime result;

if (DateTime.TryParseExact(dateStr, format, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, DateTimeStyles.None, out result))
{
    Console.WriteLine(result);
}
else
{
    Console.WriteLine("Can't parse the date: " + dateStr);
}

However, that's a big assumption.

Note that you can also specify the format string without escaping the T or the , as follows (but I escaped them to make it more obvious that they aren't format characters):

string format = "yyyyMMddTHHmmss,ffzz";

answered Mar 14 '14 at 09:57

Matthew Watson

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Not a "big" assumption (it's by far the most likely case), but an assumption nonetheless. – Rik Mar 14 '14 at 10:01
Works perfectly. For now I will make that big assumption. Thank you. – NLV Mar 14 '14 at 10:01
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't need the slashes in the format string. – Rik Mar 14 '14 at 10:02
1

@Rik That's correct - I mention this at the end of my answer. I just like to make non-format characters more obvious by escaping them with slashes. – Matthew Watson Mar 14 '14 at 10:03

String to DateTime Parsing

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