Formatting date to specific format

Question

What is the best way to format a string date to a specific format?

For example if input was 30/09/2014 it would be formatted as 2014-09-30 or any other similar date format for the former?

Answer 1

First of all, DateTime doesn't have any implicit format. Strings have.

Sounds like you just need to parse your string and format it with DateTime.ToString() method like;

string s = "30/09/2014";
DateTime dt;
if(DateTime.TryParseExact(s, "dd/MM/yyyy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
                          DateTimeStyles.None, out dt))
{
    dt.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).Dump();
    // Result will be 2014-09-30
}

Since I create this example on LINQPad , .Dump() is just an extension method.

Just be careful when you parse a string that have / as a date separator. "/" custom format specifier has a special meaning of replace me with the current culture of specified culture date separator . That means, your CurrentCulture or specified culture's DateSeparator property is not / , your parsing operation will fail even if your string and format are the same format.

That's why I used InvariantCulture in my example since it has / as a DateSeparator .