Magic strings for converting DateTime to string Using C#

Question

I was greeted with a nasty bug today. The task is pretty trivial, all I needed to do is to convert the DateTime object to string in \"yyyymmdd\" format

Answer 1

return dateTime.Year.ToString() + dateTime.Month + dateTime.Day;

You don't need to keep adding empty strings, string+number returns string already and addition is interpreted from left to right.

Do note that that line doesn't return what you think it does, what you really want is:

return dateTime.Year.ToString("0000") + dateTime.Month.ToString("00") 
    + dateTime.Day.ToString("00");