How to make DateTime.TryParse() fail if no year is specified?

Question

Consider the following code to parse a date. (Note that I\'m in the EN-gb locale):

const DateTimeStyles DATE_TIME_STYLES = DateTimeStyles.NoCurrentDateDefault |          


        

Answer 1

The more I think about this the more I think it's a bad solution but given you're getting no other answers I'll post it anyway.

DateTime temp;
DateTime.TryParse(input, CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture, DATE_TIME_STYLES, out temp);

if (temp.Year == DateTime.Now.Year)
{
    if (!input.Contains(DateTime.Now.Year))
    {
        if (temp.Days != int.Parse(DateTime.Now.Year.ToString().SubString(2)))
        {
             // my god that's gross but it tells you if the day is equal to the last two
             // digits of the current year, if that's the case make sure that value occurs
             // twice, if it doesn't then we know that no year was specified
        } 
    }
}

Also, as others have suggested in comments now, checking the number of tokens or the strings length could also be useful like;

char[] delims = new char[] { '/', '\', '-', ' '); //are there really any others?
bool yearFound = false;

foreach (char delim in delims)
{
    if (input.Split(delim).Count == 3)
    {
         yearFound = true;
         break;
    }
}

if (yearFound)
    //parse
else
    // error

These are just a couple of ideas, neither is truly sound. They're obviously both hacks, only you can know if they'll suffice. At least they beat your co-workers if (dt.Year == 2014) //discard input "solution".