How to remove time segment completely from datetime after converting to string?

Question

I need to pass a string parameter to a stored procedure that represents a date but is only 10 characters long. I cannot alter the stored procedure to change the variable type or length. My only option is to use C# to ensure that the parameter is suitable.

To do this I want to convert a DateTime object to a string and remove the time. I tried using the .Date method on the DateTime object but this merely converted the time to midnight. This was ok on my local machine which represented midnight by a series of zeros but on the machine I was deploying to my code midnight was represented by 12am. This causes the stored procedure to throw an exception.

I also tried forming a substring by taking the first 10 characters after converting the DateTime object to a string. However, this gave inconsistent results due to the fact that some days and months are single digits whereas others are double digit.

For example:

12/12/2010 gets converted to "12/12/2010"

but

01/01/1900 gets converted to "1/1/1900 1" (the '1' coming from the beginning of 12:00:000AM)

Answer 1

You can use

string date = dt.ToShortDateString();

or (synonymous)

string date = dt.ToString("d");

or

string date = dt.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

The last way ensures the format even if your current culture's date-format is different.

Answer 2

There are many ways to do this one to try is:

var myDateTime = DateTime.Now;

var parameter = myDateTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);