Cannot convert this string to Date object in Powershell

Question

I've been struggling with this for some time now and I've tried everything I could find but, have yet to be successful. I need to convert this string to a Powershell date object:

20180802 16:30:10

Everytime I try ParseExact, it's saying that it doesn't recognize the string as a valid date/time format.

Please show us the actual code (including the format string and the full error) — Mathias R. Jessen, Aug 13 '18 at 13:49
Possible duplicate of [String to DateTime conversion in PowerShell](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27741810/string-to-datetime-conversion-in-powershell) — Josh Withee, Aug 13 '18 at 13:50

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 13 '18 at 14:16

4

Following works perfectly:

[DateTime]::ParseExact('20180802 16:30:10', 'yyyyMMdd HH:mm:ss', [CultureInfo]::InvariantCulture)

I bet your problem is 24 hour format.

answered Aug 13 '18 at 14:16

Paweł Dyl

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mklement0 · Answer 2 · 2018-08-13T21:22:02.480

Pawel Dyl's helpful answer is the correct and robust solution.

Just to offer a shortcut that may be of interest in similar situations where only a simple textual reformatting is needed in order for a [datetime] cast to recognize a string containing a date/time representation:

Transforming 20180802 16:30:10 to 2018-08-02 16:30:10 would work:

PS> [datetime] ('20180802 16:30:10' -replace '^(\d{4})(\d{2})', '$1-$2-')

Thursday, August 2, 2018 4:30:10 PM  # sample output on a US-English system

Note that a [datetime] cast in PowerShell uses the invariant culture, as PowerShell does in many contexts.

Cannot convert this string to Date object in Powershell

2 Answers2