Question

My website is hosted on multiple servers at different locations

Everywhere the Culture of the data format is different- we use mm/dd/yyyy format every where but incase some server has the culture set to dd/mm/yyyy then our website generates Datetime exception.

Answer 1

You should be specifying what culture you want to use whenever you convert a string to a date.

The culture you should be using depends on what culture the dates are formatted as. For example, if all dates you are parsing are formatted as Slovak:

String s = "24. 10. 2011";

Then you need to parse the string as though it were in Slovak (Slovakia) (sk-SK) culture:

//Bad:
d = DateTime.Parse(s);

//Good:
d = DateTime.Parse(s, CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("sk-SK")); //Slovak (Slovakia)

If your dates are all in Tajik (Tajikistan Cyrillic), then you need to parse it as tg-Cryl-Tj:

String s = "24.10.11"

DateTime d = DateTime.Parse(s, CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("tg-Cryl-Tj"));

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Which leads to the question: what date format are you using? You should not be relying on the locale setting of the server, you should be deciding what format you want.

//Bad
String s = d.ToString();

//Good
String s = d.ToString(CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("si-LK")); //Sinhala (Sri Lanka)

//s = "2011-10-24 12:00:00 පෙ.ව."

i suspect that you prefer to do everything in English. But then you have to decide which variant of English:

• en-AU (English Austrailia): 24/10/2011
• en-IA (English India): 24-10-2011
• en-ZA (English South Africa): 2011/10/24
• en-US (English United States): 10/24/2011

i suspect you prefer English (India) (en-IA).

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But if you really can’t decide what culture to use when converting dates to strings and vice-versa, and the dates are never meant to be shown to a user, then you can use the Invariant Culture:

String s = "10/24/2011" //invariant culture formatted date

d = DateTime.Parse(s, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); //parse invariant culture date

s = d.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); //convert to invariant culture string