Convert date string into DateTime

Question

How to get DateTime from string: (I don't know what format it is)

Wed Jan 08 2014 00:00:00 GMT+0100 (Central Europe Standard Time)

To DateTime?

-1 because not a lot of effort has gone in to finding an answer prior to posting on SO — Neil Thompson, Jan 22 '14 at 11:01
@Dineshkumar I rolled back your changes. Please don't edit "Possible duplicate" into the body of a post. Thank you. — Mr Lister, Jan 22 '14 at 11:07

Sachin · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-22T11:26:30.603

Using DateTime.TryParseExact to parse the string into DateTime Object.

You can pass the format according to which you want parsing. Like in your case you would use

string dateString = "Wed Jan 08 2014 00:00:00 GMT+0100";
dateString = dateString.Replace("GMT+0100", "+01:00");  // to remove the timezone abbreviation and replace with offset value.

string format = "ddd MMM dd yyyy HH:mm:ss zzz";
DateTime dt;
DateTime.TryParseExact(dateString, format, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, DateTimeStyles.None, out dt);

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 22 '14 at 12:12

If you don't know what format it is, then how can you expect to parse it? How will you know if the date 2014-01-02 means the 1st Feb or 2nd Jan?

You could use a number of TryParseExact, just to rule out dates it definitely couldn't be (2014-13-12 can only be 13th Dec) but you're still left with those strings that could be parsed and are valid for two dates.

Convert date string into DateTime

2 Answers2