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Asked: 2026-06-12T06:43:21+00:00

I’m having an issue with date/time formats in ASP.NET/C#. I have my SQL Server

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I’m having an issue with date/time formats in ASP.NET/C#. I have my SQL Server database set up with a PostDate field set to a type of “datetime”. But it’s saving the date in a strange format. I added a new row through a form and I got this as the date/time string:

2012-09-28 14:56:48.910

When it gets parsed by JSON.NET it gets even stranger. I get:

2012-09-28T14:56:48.91

The date and time are obviously correct, but how do I set things so that I can parse the date into a human-friendly way? There isn’t really any code to post because the date is being added when the row is inserted. I’d like to format this as “Sept. 28, 2012 2:56 pm”. How do I do that? Do I need to format the string before or after it’s parsed as JSON?

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  1. Editorial Team

    That’s not a “strange” format at all. The second form is ISO-8601; the first is ISO-8601 without the T. Considering the strange formats you can get in JSON, it looks like you’ve been let off pretty lightly!

    Serialization formats aren’t meant to be user-friendly, particularly – they’re meant to be machine-to-machine formats.

    I would hope that JSON.NET would give you a DateTime after parsing; it should only be giving you the ISO-8601 format after you’ve converted back to JSON.

    If you’ve got a DateTime that you want to format for user consumption, there are all kinds of options with standard and custom format strings. Don’t forget that you should respect the culture of the user, as far as possible – so make sure you’re taking appropriate steps to either set the thread’s current culture to be the user’s one, or that you’re passing the culture explicitly to DateTime.ToString etc.

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