CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#regex
Brandon
Brandon

Reputation: 3276

How to Allow Characters in Certain Spot in String

I'm trying to parse a date. The problem, is my regular expression omits any letter because I want to avoid 01-28-2019 UTC or any letters outside of the main date. Now, it works fine when the date is formatted like I just listed, however it fails when we get a date formatted like 28-JAN-19.

var sourceValue = Regex.Replace("28-JAN-19", @"[A-Za-z]", "");
var parsed = DateTime.Parse(sourceValue);

The date I need to parse can be in a few different formats. Can a regular expression be used to handle this? If so, what tweaks are needed to trim any letters outside of the xx-xx-xx part of the string?

28-JAN-19 28-01-19 28-JAN-19 13:15:00 28-01-19 13:15:00 28-01-2019 13:15:00

Upvotes: 0

Views: 59

Answers (2)

Icemanind
Icemanind

Reputation: 48696

This RegEx should match all the examples you provided:

[0-9]{2}-([A-Za-z]{3}|[0-9]{2})-[0-9]{2,4}( [0-9][0-9]?:[0-9][0-9]?:[0-9][0-9])?

It does make a couple of assumptions though, based on your examples. First, it assumes all your dates will always start with a 2-digit day. It also assumes that your month abbreviations will be 3 letters long. It also assumes that your hours, minutes and seconds will all be 2 digits long. Let me know if any of these assumptions are incorrect.

Upvotes: 1

stimms
stimms

Reputation: 44074

Regular expressions are likely not your best bet. If you know the full set of formats you might encounter then you can use the regular DateTime.ParseExact with a format string. Check for a FormatException to know if you've successfully parsed the date. If your months are using English abbreviations then be sure to pass in an English culture

DateTime.ParseExact("28-JAN-19", "dd-MMM-yy", new CultureInfo("en"));

Upvotes: 1

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