Question

How do I go about displaying a format string as-is?

I have a property decorated with some data annotations:

[DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:MM/dd/yyyy}")]
public blah blah { get; set; }

I now have a reference to the format string:

string format = metadata.DisplayFormatString; // == {0:MM/dd/yyyy}

I want to display this format string to the user without manually typing it in my view. Is there a nice way (not replace chars with empty string) to get MM/dd/yyyy from the string format?

Answer 1

I thing using replace is a nice way too. If you’re concerned about clutter in the view, you could put this into an extension method (or even an HTML Helper extension method).

public static string ToUserFriendlyDateFormat(this string unfriendlyFormat) {
    return unfriendlyFormat
        .Replace("{0:", string.Empty)
        .Replace("}", string.Empty);
}