Question

How can I convert the following strings to a System.DateTime object?

Wednesday 13th January 2010
Thursday 21st January 2010
Wednesday 3rd February 2010

Normally something like the following would do it

DateTime dt;
DateTime.TryParseExact(value, "dddd d MMMM yyyy", DateTimeFormatInfo.InvariantInfo, DateTimeStyles.None, out dt);

but this doesn’t work because of the ‘th’, ‘st’ or ‘rd’ in the string

Update

It appears that DateTime doesn’t support formatting the ‘th’, ‘st’, ‘rd’ etc so they need to be stripped before parsing. Rubens Farias provides a nice regular expression below.

Answer 1

What about strip them?

string value = "Wednesday 13th January 2010";
DateTime dt;
DateTime.TryParseExact(
    Regex.Replace(value, @"(\w+ \d+)\w+ (\w+ \d+)", "$1 $2"),
    "dddd d MMMM yyyy", 
    DateTimeFormatInfo.InvariantInfo, 
    DateTimeStyles.None, out dt);