Convert Dates

Hi, Does anyone know of an easy(built in) way to convert a string like '20081231T130000' (ICalendar I think) to DateTime in C#? Or do I need to parse the string?

From stackoverflow

• Try this:

  DateTime when = DateTime.ParseExact("20081231T130000",
      "yyyyMMddTHHmmss",CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
  

  Aside: it is close to the format used in xml, but not quite close enough - otherwise XmlConvert wraps this:

  DateTime when = XmlConvert.ToDateTime("2008-12-31T13:00:00");
  

  : Once again thanks Marc.

• This seemed to work:

  string dateTimeString = "20080115T115959";
  string format = "yyyyMMddTHHmmss";
  IFormatProvider us = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US", true);
  
  DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact(dateTimeString, format, us);
  

  Jon Skeet : The hh should be HH to use a 24 hour clock.

  Marc Gravell : Needs to be HH (0-23), not hh (0-11) - and invariant would probably do just fine since there is no culture-specific info in the string.

  Andy White : Thanks for catching that... I guess that's why I'm only at 11 reputation :)

  Unsliced : Virtual +1 for the HH comments to Jon and Marc. I've just spent an hour thinking "that worked this morning" ... :)