Question

I want to convert a string ’30/12/2012′ to ‘2012/12/30’. My application is set to “en-CA” however the database accepts yyyy/MM/dd as default.

How can I do this without depending on the current culture info set
at server?

Answer 1

As all the comments have said, but none of the answers have said so far: don’t pass this to the database as a string.

Parse any text you receive as early as possible, then use DateTime to represent it everywhere else, including how you send it to the database, via parameterized SQL¹. This goes for values of all kinds: convert it into the “natural” type for the data as soon as possible, and keep it in that natural representation for as long as possible. A date isn’t a string, and you should only convert it to a string if you really, really need to – ideally just before displaying it to a user.

The parsing can be done with DateTime.ParseExact or DateTime.TryParseExact depending on whether this is “suspicious” data (e.g. from a user) or data which should really be correct and for which an exception is the most appropriate reaction to unparseable values. I suggest you pass in CultureInfo.InvariantCulture with your custom format string. For example:

DateTime date = DateTime.ParseExact(text, "dd/MM/yyyy",
                                    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

(If you do a lot of date/time work, you may also want to consider using my Noda Time project which allows you to express the value in a richer way – in this case you’d probably use LocalDate.)

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¹ If you’re not already using parameterized SQL, but are instead baking values directly into the SQL, you have bigger problems than date/time conversions.