I am facing a small issue which i am not able after trying so many things so here it goes ..... There is a text box in my page in which i am entering date and i want that da
If you want to access it given a particular format, you should use DateTime.ToString(string format).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zdtaw1bw.aspx
Try DateTime.Parse with an appropriate format provider. In your case it should be
IFormatProvider culture = new CultureInfo("de-DE", true);
DateTime.Parse(txtDate.Text, culture );
EDIT: This value: "11/2/2010" doesn't match the format "dd/MM/yyyy". It matches the format "d/M/yyyy" - for "dd/MM/yyyy" it should be "11/02/2010".
That's why TryParseExact
is failing for you. You need to pick the right format pattern.
A DateTime
value doesn't have a format. It just represents date and time (in the ISO calendar, and possibly in different time zones, but that's a different matter). It's like an int
- it doesn't represent "a decimal integer" or "a hex integer" - it's just an integer within a particular range. You can format a number as decimal or hex, but it doesn't inherently have a format.
It sounds like you should parse it with ParseExact
to specify the format when converting from the textbox, or probably TryParseExact:
// This is assuming you're absolutely sure of the format used. This is *not*
// necessarily the user's preferred format. You should think about where your
// data is coming from.
DateTime date;
if (DateTime.TryParseExact(text, "dd/MM/yyyy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
DateTimeStyles.None, out date))
{
// Okay, successful parse. We now have the date. Use it, avoiding formatting
// it back to a string for as long as possible.
}
You should keep that value as DateTime
for all purposes except giving it back to a user - at which point you may well want to use their cultural settings.
In particular, if you're storing the value in a database you should not convert it to text and include it in a SQL statement - that's asking for trouble. Instead, use a parameterized SQL statement and set it as the parameter value, still as a DateTime
.
DateTime
doesn't store dates in any specific format - it uses an internal representation (what exactly shouldn't matter).
After parsing the string to a DateTime
, there is no inherent format there. There is only a format when you output the value. What you see in the debugger is simply a conversion to a string using your system settings.
If you want to format the DateTime
, use ToString
with a format string:
dt.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy");
The converse also applies - if you need to parse the string unambiguously, use ParseExact
or TryParseExact
(both static members of of DateTime
):
DateTime dt;
if(DateTime.TryParseExact(txtDate.Text, "dd/MM/yyyy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
DateTimeStyles.None, out td))
{
// Valid date used in `txtDate.Text`, use dt now.
}
Read about custom and standard Date and Time format strings.
In order to avoid any error on months / days when parsing a date, it is probably better to use DateTime.Parse or DateTime.ParseExact than ToDateTime
.
As this thread and this article pointed out.