Question

I have a string like this:
250920111414

I want to create a DateTime object from that string. As of now, I use substring and do it like this:

string date = 250920111414;

int year = Convert.ToInt32(date.Substring(4, 4));
int month = Convert.ToInt32(date.Substring(2, 2));
...
DateTime dt = new DateTime(year, month, day ...);

Is it possible to use string format, to do the same, without substring?

Answer 1

Absolutely. Guessing the format from your string, you can use ParseExact

string format = "ddMMyyyyHHmm";

DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact(value, format, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

or TryParseExact:

DateTime dt;
bool success = DateTime.TryParseExact(value, format, 
                     CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, DateTimeStyles.None, out dt);

The latter call will simply return false on parse failure, instead of throwing an exception – if you may have bad data which shouldn’t cause the overall task to fail (e.g. it’s user input, and you just want to prompt them) then this is a better call to use.

EDIT: For more details about the format string details, see “Custom Date and Time Format Strings” in MSDN.