Question

I have a string “13/6/2011”.I have to convert it into DateTime. For this i am using

 DateTime.ParseExact("13/6/2011","DD/MM/YYYY",null);

But it showing

 String was not recognized as a valid DateTime

exception.
Any idea why?

Answer 1

In addition to the “6” vs “06” problem that ChrisF has mentioned, your format string is incorrect. Day-of-month is “dd” and year is “yyyy”, so you should have a format of “dd/MM/yyyy”.

Additionally, I’d recommend explicitly passing in CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, as otherwise the “/” could actually be treated as a different (culture-specific) date separator. (Another alternative is to quote the slashes, but I think using an invariant culture pins things down more.)

In other words, I’d use something like this:

// Sample for text: 13/06/2011
DateTime date = DateTime.ParseExact(text, "dd/MM/yyyy",
                                    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

If you don’t necessarily have a two-digit day or month, use:

DateTime date = DateTime.ParseExact(text, "d/M/yyyy",
                                    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

It’s not immediately clear to me whether that also copes with (say) 13/06/2011 though.