Question

I am currently trying to parse a string that is obtained from an xml that is downloaded from the web every few minutes. The string looks like this:

Thu Jul 12 08:39:56 GMT+0100 2012

At first I just did a string.split and took out everything after the time (GMT+0100 2012) and inserted 2012 after the date.

This worked great until the date changed to:

Thu Jul 12 08:39:56 GMT+0000 2012

So I would like to dynamically pasre the GMT+ whatever as they send me that string in c#.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use DateTime.ParseExact with a custom date and time format string:

DateTime.ParseExact("Thu Jul 12 08:39:56 GMT+0000 2012", 
                    "ddd MMM dd hh:mm:ss 'GMT'K yyyy",
                    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)

This will throw a format exception if the string and format string do not match exactly, so you may want to use DateTime.TryParseExact that will return a false if it fails.

Instead of DateTime you may want to use DateTimeOffset that preserved timezone information , as @Keith commented – this may be important to your application.