CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#parsingdatetime
Samora
Samora

Reputation: 63

Why does c# DateTime.Parse seem to interpret string incorrectly?

Can someone please explain why the following code outputs "4/14/2013 8:00:00 PM"?

var dt = "2013-04-15+00:00";
var result = DateTime.Parse(dt);

Upvotes: 3

Views: 964

Answers (5)

Dave
Dave

Reputation: 518

The MSDN documentation describes this in depth.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1k1skd40(v=vs.90).aspx

It is reading in the string in UTC because of the +00:00. It is printing out in localtime.

Upvotes: 0

Jeppe Stig Nielsen
Jeppe Stig Nielsen

Reputation: 61912

The "+00:00" part of your string is interpreted as the time zone. That is a "geographical" zone of 0 hours and 0 minutes to the east of Greenwich.

If you intended the "+00:00" part to be the time of day instead, use a format string, like so:

var dt = "2013-04-15+00:00";
var result = DateTime.ParseExact(dt, "yyyy-MM-dd+HH:mm", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

The "HH" and "mm" means hours and minutes of the (local) time of day. In the opposite direction, with "yyyy-MM-ddzzz", the "+00:00" part will mean time zone.

Upvotes: 0

Brian Reischl
Brian Reischl

Reputation: 7356

At a guess, I think Anthony Pergram's comment is right. Most likely it is interpreting the string as a date, "2013-04-15", a timezone of "+00:00" which is GMT, and no time-of-day. The default time-of-day is midnight, so the resulting date is equal to "2013-04-15 at midnight GMT". That is then converted to your local timezone, which is four hours behind GMT, and output as you see.

If you can, you should use a more precise date/time format such as ISO 8601, which would look like "2013-04-15T00:00:00Z", or "2013-04-15T00:00:00-04:00"

Upvotes: 1

Patrick D'Souza
Patrick D'Souza

Reputation: 3573

That is because it is taking your system timezone into account. It then adjust the specified time appropriately

Upvotes: 0

Servy
Servy

Reputation: 203802

There are many ways of formatting dates/times in different regions, cultures, contexts, etc. When using DateTime.Parse it will do its best to guess what to do, but it will often be unsuccessful in cases where there are ambiguities in determining which datetime format is appropriate.

You can use DateTime.ParseExact in order to specify the exact formatting that the string is using to format the date.

Upvotes: 1

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