Question

I’m trying to format a DateTime in a C# function, but I can’t get it to work.

The format I’m trying to get is like this:

"28/02/2012"

I’ve tried different ways to format the DateTime, for example:

string formattedDate = DateTime.Today.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy");

string formattedDate = String.Format("{0:dd/MM/yyyy}", DateTime.Today);

Both these examples are giving me this result:

"28.02.2012"

I’ve formatted DateTimes many times before using the two ways shown above, but I can’t really see why I’m getting “.” instead of “/”.

Is there some configuration that has to be set up or something?

Answer 1

phoog has given the correct reason, but I would suggest the wrong workaround. If you always want to format the date/time as if you were in a particular culture (probably the invariant culture) then you can do that:

string formattedDate = DateTime.Today.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy", 
                                               CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

I find this cleaner than forcing some parts of the format into an invariant form, while leaving others (the numbers) up to the culture. For example, consider this:

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Threading;

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("ar-SA");
        Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ci;
        string formattedDate = DateTime.Today.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy");
        Console.WriteLine(formattedDate);
    }
}

Today, that prints “06/04/1433” – which is appropriate for the Islamic calendar, but probably isn’t what you expected.