Question

I’m parsing an XML file from an external source, and I have 2 attributes which contain the date and time respectively. I’m looking for the best way to get these into a format I can parse as a date so I can do things with it, but at the moment I’m just getting errors or no results with the methods I’ve tried.

The date is in the format “20111215” – which is yyyymmdd as it’s UK based.
The time is formatted as “1417+0000” which I presume is the time plus offset from GMT?

Basically I need to get these into UK time. I’ve tried using DateTime.Parse on the separate parts but both give an error as not valid format. Tried String.Format on the date part but that didn’t change it at all. I presume I need to combine the 2 before parsing but I’m not sure if I need to do anything else with it to make it acceptable.

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

Use a DateTimeOffset to incorporate the timezone into the DateTime.

        string date = "20111215";
        string time = "1417+0500";

        string dateAndTime = date + time;

        string format = "yyyyMMddHHmmzzz";

        CultureInfo provider = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;

        DateTimeOffset t = DateTimeOffset.ParseExact(dateAndTime, format, provider);