Question

I am comparing the time now to a time stored somewhere in a database. The time stored in the database is in the format of “yyyyMMddHHmmss”. For example, the database may return 201106203354 for a stored time value. I am then using a function to compare the time now to the time read in from the database.

What I am doing now:

1. Create 6 int variables
2. Take the sub-string from the formatted date string and convert the sub-string to an int32.
3. Pass the 6 int variables to the function.

What I would like to do:

Rather than splitting up the formatted date-time string, and seperately creating and assigning six variables to pass to the function, I would like to know if there is some way to simply convert the formatted date-time string into DateTime.

Please see my code as it will help to explain what I clearly cannot …

Pass time now along with time read from database:

Private void passTime()
{
            string timeStamp;
            int year, month, day, hour, minutes, seconds;

            DateTime dt = DateTime.Now;

            timeStamp = dt.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss");

            year = Convert.ToInt32(timeStamp.Substring(0, 4));
            month = Convert.ToInt32(timeStamp.Substring(4, 2));
            day = Convert.ToInt32(timeStamp.Substring(6, 2));
            hour = Convert.ToInt32(timeStamp.Substring(8, 2));
            minutes = Convert.ToInt32(timeStamp.Substring(10, 2));
            seconds = Convert.ToInt32(timeStamp.Substring(12, 2));

            MessageBox.Show(GetDifferenceDate(
                            new DateTime(year,month,day,hour,minutes,seconds),
                            // Example time from database
                            new DateTime(2011, 08, 11, 11, 40, 26)));
}

static string GetDifferenceDate(DateTime date1, DateTime date2)
        {
            if (DateTime.Compare(date1, date2) >= 0)
            {
                TimeSpan ts = date1.Subtract(date2);
                return string.Format("{0} days",
                    ts.Days);
            }
            else
                return "Not valid";
        }

So, quite simply, I would like to compare two dates that are both in the format of “yyyyMMddHHmmss”, or if this is not possible, I would like to convert the previous Date string into a DateTime.

I’m sure I left something out here, I will go back and read it again but please feel free to ask me anything that I left unclear.

Thank you,
Evan

Answer 1

You’re looking for ParseExact:

DateTime.ParseExact(timeStamp, "yyyyMMddHHmmss", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)