Unable to parse date time in C#

Question

I know such questions are in ton here. Please go through once

I have a string coming from textbox having current date eg 10/9/2012, my class property is of DateTime? type. I am using Convert.ToDateTime(datetime_string_from_textbox) but it gives me a FormatException . I then tried DateTime.ParseExact(string, format, CultureInfo, DateTimeStyle) as suggested by Jon Skeet here but still it gave me the same exception.

One more thing — my local machine date time format is dd-mm-yyyy . When I switch this to mm/dd/yyyy format the code works fine. So basically , I want to know how to parse a valid datetime string to a DateTime object irrespective of the regional settings, or any settings or any dependency on local machine.

Is this possible?

Update : Code in use

employee.JoiningDate = DateTime.ParseExact(string.Format("{0} 00:00:00", JoiningDate.Text.Trim()), "MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal | DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal); 

Existing Problem and Required Solution

My system datetime shows 24-10-2012 (that is, 24th Oct) and I have 10/17/2012 in my text box (that is, 17th Oct) since the text box date is also valid and after deployment again the client datetime format will become unknown so, I want a generic way to parse any valid datetime string irrespective of regional settings. Is this possible?

Answer 1

This should work:

var date = DateTime.ParseExact(str, "M/d/yyyy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

As tested bellow:

Answer 2

Try formatting your date to international date format using this method:

How would you format DateTime in international format?

Also you can check this for your current culture:

Set Default DateTime Format c#

Answer 3

It totally depends on the machine settings. DateTime.ParseExact(str, "dd/MM/yyyy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); will work for British format but it will give format exception on US format. So use format according to your machine settings.

Answer 4

Try the following if it works

var formatInfo = new DateTimeFormatInfo();
formatInfo.ShortDatePattern = "MM/dd/yyyy";
DateTime.Parse(date, formatInfo);