Question

I know Win32 has the NLS function GetDateFormat, e.g.:

GetDateFormat(…, …, …, "dddd','MM','y", …, …);

and it also has the function GetTimeFormat, e.g.:

GetTimeFormat(…, …, …, "tt ss':'hh':'mm", …, …);

But is there a way to format both the date and time at once, like a hypothetical GetDateTimeFormat function?

GetDateTimeFormat(…, …, …, "tt dddd' - 'ss':'y';'hh':'mm MM", …, …);

Note: The format string is intentionally constructed to demonstrate that not all format strings are linearly separable. Thus, this is not the trivial problem that it appears to simply concatenate the results of GetDateFormat and GetTimeFormat.

Answer 1

I remember having the same problem sometime ago. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to format a string with mixed date and time fields. Trying to do it in two steps is error prone, since the first substitution might generate words whose letters are mistaken for format codes.

My solution at the time was to scan the format string manually and generate the output by calling GetDateFormat() and GetTimeFormat() for each code. This can be optimized by grouping consecutive time or date codes if needed.