Question

I have the following code, which reads the date and time from some DateTimePickers in VB.

I need to be able to determine if the first value is a 0 or a 1, (eg 09:12… or 12:13…) and if it starts with a 0 to remove that character from the string.

this is what i have so far, but it takes the first character regardless.

    DateFrom = Form1.DateTimePickerFrom.Value.ToString
    DateTo = Form1.DateTimePickerTo.Value.ToString
    VarTimeFrom = Form1.HourTimePickerFrom.Value.ToString
    VarTimeTo = Form1.HourTimePickerTo.Value.ToString

    Dim DateFromManipulated = Left(DateFrom, 10)
    Dim DateToManipulated = Left(DateTo, 10)
    Dim TimeFromManipulated = Right(VarTimeFrom, 9)
    Dim TimeToManipulated = Right(VarTimeTo, 9)

    If Left(DateFromManipulated, 1) = 0 Then

        TimeFromMan = TimeFromManipulated.Remove(0, 1)
    Else
        TimeFromMan = TimeFromManipulated
    End If


    If Left(TimeFromManipulated, 1) = 0 Then

        TimeToMan = TimeToManipulated.Remove(0, 1)
    Else
        TimeToMan = TimeToManipulated
    End If

    Console.WriteLine(DateFromManipulated)
    Console.WriteLine(TimeToMan)
    Console.WriteLine(TimeFromManipulated)
    Console.WriteLine(TimeFromMan)
    Console.WriteLine(DateToManipulated)
    Console.WriteLine(TimeToManipulated)

I get the following:

09/11/2012
1:36:00 
06:36:00 
6:36:00 
08/01/2013
11:36:00 

Thanks in advance!

Mike

Answer 1

A string in VB.NET won’t compare as equal to an integer. You could just reference character zero, though:

If DateFromManipulated(0) = "0"c Then DateFromManipulated = DateFromManipulated.Substring(1)

… however, you should be just formatting your date the way you want it to begin with:

Dim dateFrom As String = DateTimePickerFrom.Value.ToString("M/dd/yyyy H:mm:ss")

… for example. (M doesn’t have a leading zero, as opposed to MM; same with H.) You can find all the format strings here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4.aspx