Simple Date Time Format in .NET

DateTime format it’s a simple but interesting enough to get my attention. The problem begin when I must work with the DateTime type and I encountered several exception that raised because of date time formatting.

For explanatory purpose here I give a brief introduction on date time formatting in .NET platform:

Format Specifier	Description
d	Displays the specified date of the month (short form).
D	Displays the specified date of the month (long form).
dd	Displays the specified date of the month (measured the number between 1 and 31 -inclusive-). If the number is a single digit only, then the formatting preceding with zero number.
ddd	Displays abbreviated name of the specified date.
dddd (or more)	Displays full name of the specified date.
MM	Displays the specified month (two digits).
MMM	Displays abbreviated name of the specified month.
MMMM (or more)	Displays full name of the specified month.
t	Displays specified date and time (short form).
f	Displays specified date and time (long form, time format excluding second digits).
F	Displays specified date and time (long form, time format including second digits).
yy	Displays two digits number of the specified year, the first two digits are omitted.
yyyy	Displays the specified year.
HH	Displays hour for the specified DateTime in am/pm format.
hh	Displays hour for the specified DateTime in 24 hours format.
mm	Displays minute for the specified DateTime (range: 0-59).
ss	Displays second for the specified DateTime (range: 0-59).

Please refers to the .NET documentation for the more complete date time formatting, I exclude several formats here.

The above formatting is done using DateTime.ToString() method. ToString method from DateTime class has four overloads. One of them receives string as a parameter and then we can do date time formatting like the following (written in C#):

using System;

namespace Learning_Materials
{

class SimpleDateTimeFormats

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

DateTime date = DateTime.Now;

// print out the date time using default format

Console.WriteLine(date.ToString());

// otherwise, specify the other formats

Console.WriteLine(date.ToString(“d”));

Console.WriteLine(date.ToString(“dd/MM/yyyy”)); // Indonesian format (date/month/year).

Console.WriteLine(date.ToString(“dd-MMMM-yyyy hh:mm:ss”)); // Indonesian format (date-month(fullname)- year hour(24 hours):minutes:seconds)

Console.WriteLine(date.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy”)); // en-us format (month/date/year).

Console.WriteLine(date.ToString(“MMMM dd, yyyy HH:mm:ss”)); // en-us format (month date, year hours(am/pm format):minutes:seconds).

}

}

}

 

Here we go, sometimes missing the date time format can be so sucks. I ever do this mistake when I must insert user input in string format to the MS SQL Server database. the input was in date/month/year format (standard format for Indonesian date) but the SQL Server format was month/date/year, finally the exception happen.

Hopefully that I will found more interesting things in my coding experience and I can learn more from my mistakes (smile face). Regards and see you later.

Tri Sugiyantowo (triaslama)