Home/ Questions/Q 6667015
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-26T02:53:20+00:00

I’ve been using custom formats for displaying DateTimes as found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4.aspx e.g. new

  • 0

I’ve been using custom formats for displaying DateTimes as found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4.aspx

e.g.

new DateTime(2011,10,5).ToString("dd");

Returns: "05"

and:

new DateTime(2011,10,5).ToString("d MM");

Returns "5 10"

Which are both as I would expect, but:

new DateTime(2011,10,5).ToString("d");

Returns: "05/10/2011"

When I would have expected it to return: "5"

This doesn’t matter in practise as you would use: new DateTime(2011,10,5).Day to get the day, but I am interested as to why the custom format didn’t work as I would have expected.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try reading here Standard Date and Time Format Strings "d" Short date pattern.. Yes, it was probably a little stupid to reuse the d :-), fortunately it’s a corner case.

    In general you should always use the CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, for things that aren’t input/output to the user, unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing and you know your program won’t be sold abroad. So if you are showing a date to the user, use his culture/the local culture. If you are asking a date to the user the same. But if you are using the date to name a file or to do some internal operations, normally it’s better to use CultureInfo.InvariantCulture.

    Try this:

    Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.ToString("MM", new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("ar-SA")));
Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy", new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("ar-SA")));

Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.ToString("MM", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));
Console.WriteLine(DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));

    and tell me what you see 🙂

    • 0