Question

I am trying to parse a French date to a DateTime object with no luck so far. Is there a way to do that?

String foo = "mar, 20 avr 2010 09:00:00 -0500";

I’ve already tried parsing with a different culture and changing the culture of the thread.

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("fr-CA",true);
CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("fr-CA",true);
DateTime.Parse(foo,culture,DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal);

Answer 1

You can only parse (with Parse or ParseExact) what you can create when formatting a DateTime.

The closest custom format specifier to your example input is probably something like this:

ddd, dd MMM yyyy HH’:’mm’:’ss zzz

Code:

CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("fr-CA", true);

var f = new DateTimeOffset(2010, 04, 20, 09, 00, 00, TimeSpan.FromHours(-5))
            .ToString("ddd, dd MMM yyyy HH':'mm':'ss zzz", culture);

This produces the following result:

"mar., 20 avr. 2010 09:00:00 -05:00"

As you can see, the short day and short month specifier (ddd and MMM) add a . after the name, and the time-zone specifier (zzz) inserts a :.

I believe it’s not possible to trick ToString into generating the desired output, and thereby also not to parse the result with ParseExact. I guess you have to parse the string yourself using plain old string manipulation.