Question

I’m trying to parse the Associated Press RSS feed and the date is really confusing me. Here is an example of one item in the feed:

<entry>
    <id>urn:publicid:ap.org:Hosted2Syndication:b7f6d88749d341aa9a30e15dcb983b41</id>
    <title type="text">9/11 defendants ignore judge at Guantanamo hearing</title>
    <summary type="text">GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — They knelt in prayer, ignored the judge and wouldn't listen to Arabic translations as they confronted nearly 3,000 counts of murder. The self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and four co-defendants defiantly disrupted an arraignment that dragged into Saturday night in the opening act of the long-stalled effort to prosecute them in a military court.</summary>
    <published>2012-05-05T22:38:59-04:00</published>
    <updated>2012-05-05T20:28:08-04:00</updated>
    <author />
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="AP Article" href="http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-05-05-Guantanamo-Sept%2011%20Trial/id-b7f6d88749d341aa9a30e15dcb983b41" />
    <content type="xhtml"></content>
</entry>

So the published date is: 2012-05-05T22:38:59-04:00

If you view this item in your browser, the date is being displayed as: May. 5, 2012 8:28 PM ET

When I convert it to a date in code, however:

DateTime date;

DateTime.TryParse("2012-05-05T22:38:59-04:00", out date);

It’s coming out as: 5/5/2012 10:38:59 PM

I don’t know why the website’s displayed date is 2 hours different.

You can probably see the difference with any item in the current feed:

http://hosted2.ap.org/atom/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305

Answer 1

You are correctly seeing the <updated>2012-05-05T20:28:08-04:00</updated> date/time in the article when you load the actual story as May. 5, 2012 8:28 PM ET

20:28:08 (GMT-4) == 8:28 PM (ET)

Your C# code is fine but you’ll have to ask the AP why the article was last updated two hours before it was actually published.