CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#asp.netdatedatetimelocalization
argamanza
argamanza

Reputation: 1142

Unified Date format with no reliance to the server/system

I have an ASP.NET / C# web site i'm building, in one of the pages i'm asking the user to choose a date with a date picker of my own which send the date to my code-behind in "dd/MM/yyyy" format.

The problem starts when the site is online, my computer is using the "dd/MM/yyyy" format and the server uses the "MM/dd/yyyy" format, so when i try to convert the date received in the code-behind to a DateTime type using "Conver.ToDateTime()" on my own PC it works just fine, but when the site is online, if the date is for example "14/05/2015" it will cause an 'String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.' error, since it's trying to convert it to a format which causes it to be an illegal date (5th day of 14th month).

What's the best elegant solution for this problem? Thanks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 504

Answers (3)

James Woodall
James Woodall

Reputation: 735

I've had the best experience formatting the date with ISO format. It is well-defined and can't possibly get confused.

For example:

DateTime.Now.ToString("o")

This will produce:

2015-07-04T16:56:54.2508072+01:00

To be double-sure, you can always parse it back this way:

DateTime.ParseExact(dateAsStr, "o", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)

Upvotes: 0

SLaks
SLaks

Reputation: 887469

You need to pass a specific CultureInfo or format string to all of your date parsing and ToString() calls.

Upvotes: 1

Jason Watkins
Jason Watkins

Reputation: 3785

Send the date in a fixed format, like ISO (yyyy-MM-dd). If all parties use the same format, there will be no ambiguity.

Upvotes: 1

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