Question

I have a date time as a string, eg. “2010-08-02”, I’m trying to convert it to UTC with the following code snippet

DateTime.ParseExact("2010-08-02Z", "yyyy-MM-ddZ", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)

When I print to the console, I get the following: 8/1/2010 5:00:00 PM.
Is there a reason why the date shows up as the date before the date I’m trying to parse? I could just add a day to this to advance to the original day, but I wanted to see if there’s anything I’m doing wrong in the formatting that’s causing this.

Answer 1

If the original string is just a date in the format “2010-08-02” (without the Z), then why not just:

DateTime.SpecifyKind(
    DateTime.ParseExact("2010-08-02", 
         "yyyy-MM-dd", 
         CultureInfo.InvariantCulture),
         DateTimeKind.Utc);

ParseExact will presumably return a DateTime with Kind = Unspecified, and you can make it UTC or Local as you wish using SpecifyKind.