DateTime string conversion with both full month name and AM/PM

Question

I know similar questions have been asked such as here: DateTime string conversion with both month name and AM/PM

Indeed, I am having a very similar problem but even when I follow the answers to the question above it still doesn't seem to work for me. I'm trying to execute the following piece of code:

dateTime = DateTime.ParseExact(dateString + " " + yearString + " " + 
timeString, "MMMM dd yyyy HH:mm tt", 
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Where 'dateString' is "September 25" 'yearstring' is "2017" 'timestring' is "6:30 PM"

The Exception that gets thrown when executing this code is FormatException String was not recognized as a valid DateTime. In my date string above I am inserting a single white space for each use of quotes.

Use `h` instead of `HH`. `HH` is the 24-hour-clock hour, so it makes little sense to use it in conjunction with `tt`. I very much doubt that the full month name has anything to do with this. — Jon Skeet, Aug 26 '17 at 18:32
Thanks @JonSkeet, however, I've made that change and am still getting the error. — andy_coder, Aug 26 '17 at 18:36
@andy_coder `DateTime.ParseExact("September 25 2017 6:30 PM", "MMMM dd yyyy h:mm tt", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)` just works fine. Your error (you didn't _even_ mentioned what it was exactly) might come somewhere else. Also it would be better to check your string(s) doesn't have _any_ invisible character using with a unicode explorer. — Soner Gönül, Aug 26 '17 at 18:46
Please show that in the question then, ideally in the form of a [mcve] - there's no need to do string concatenation when you can just show the example with the complete hard-coded string. — Jon Skeet, Aug 26 '17 at 18:54
So I just got it to work. Your comment, @SonerGönül, might of helped me. I made 2 changes. I changed H to lower case h and I created the full date time string first in a new varaible and then passed that in the datetime.parseexact() function. — andy_coder, Aug 26 '17 at 19:02

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 26 '17 at 19:04

I got this to work by doing two things (probably the second item more relevant). I changed upper case H in my format string to lower case h. Additionally I saved the full date time string first in a separate variable and then passed that in to the DateTime.ParseExact() function. Maybe other users can answer WHY this worked.

Thanks Stack Overflow community.

DateTime string conversion with both full month name and AM/PM

1 Answers1