CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#regexstring
Tzah Mama
Tzah Mama

Reputation: 1567

Replacing characters at specific locations

My input is a string that represent machine's execution time and date. The problem is that this string is formatted badly therefore I can't use DateTime.Parse to convert it to a DateTime object.

Input example:

2014-01-07-15.26.46.000452

I need to convert it to something I can work with (replacing the last '-' with a space and the first 2 '.' with a ':') like so:

2014-01-07 15:26:46.000452

I figured I should use regex to solve this because I need to replace characters at specific locations so myString.Replace won't do any good. Unfortunately, my knowledge of using regex is close to nothing and I couldn't find any examples to match my problem.

Can anyone help me solve this one out? (Also, I would like an explanation on how & why this regex works)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 63

Answers (2)

Patrick Hofman
Patrick Hofman

Reputation: 156918

It doesn't look very pretty, but does the job:

string yourString = "2014-01-07-15.26.46.000452";
string newString = Regex.Replace(yourString, @"(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+)-(\d+).(\d+).(\d+).(\d+)", "$1-$2-$3 $4:$5:$6.$7");

It just cuts all the numerics apart from the gibberish around it and constructs the date you want to.

Upvotes: 2

Adil
Adil

Reputation: 148110

You can parse it using DateTime.ParseExact by Custom Date and Time Format Strings

DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact( "2014-01-07-15.26.46.000452", 
                                   "yyyy-MM-dd-H.m.s.ffffff",
                                   System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Upvotes: 5

Related Questions