Question

I have made a generic parser for parsing ascii files.
When I want to parse dates, I use ParseExact function in DateTime object to parse, but I get problems with the year.

The text to parse is i.e. “090812” with the parseExact string “yyMMdd”.

I’m hoping to get a DateTime object saying “12/8-2009”, but I get “12/8-1909”.
I know, that I could make an ugly solution by parsing it afterwards, and thereby modifying the year..

Anyone know of a smart way to solve this ??

Thanks in advance..

Søren

Answer 1

Theoretically elegant way of doing this: change the TwoDigitYearMax property of the Calendar used by the DateTimeFormatInfo you’re using to parse the text. For instance:

CultureInfo current = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture;
DateTimeFormatInfo dtfi = (DateTimeFormatInfo) current.DateTimeFormat.Clone();
// I'm not *sure* whether this is necessary
dtfi.Calendar = (Calendar) dtfi.Calendar.Clone();
dtfi.Calendar.TwoDigitYearMax = 1910;

Then use dtfi in your call to DateTime.ParseExact.

Practical way of doing this: add “20” to the start of your input, and parse with “yyyyMMdd”.