I'm trying to convert a string into Datetime format this is the my code
CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("da-DK"); DateTime endDateDt = DateTime.ParseExact("05-02-2015 15:00", "dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm", culture); Response.Write(endDateDt); This is the output result
2/5/2015 3:00:00 PM
The output I'm looking for should be
05-02-2015 15:00
What am I doing wrong?
You are not formatting string representation of the DateTime object. If you haven't specified format then you will get default format based on the current culture.
For getting the desired output you can try this:
endDateDt.ToString("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm"); Let's go more deep..
Response.Write method doesn't have an overload for DateTime, that's why this calls Response.Write(object) overload. And here how it's implemented;
public virtual void Write(Object value) { if (value != null) { IFormattable f = value as IFormattable; if (f != null) Write(f.ToString(null, FormatProvider)); else Write(value.ToString()); } } Since DateTime implementes IFormattable interface, this will generate
f.ToString(null, FormatProvider) as a result. And from DateTime.ToString(String, IFormatProvider) overload.
If format is
nullor an empty string (""), the standard format specifier, "G", is used.
Looks like your CurrentCulture's ShortDatePattern is M/d/yyyy and LongTimePattern is h:mm:ss tt and that's why you get 2/5/2015 3:00:00 PM as a result.
As a solution, you can get string representation of your DateTime with .ToString() method and supply to use HttpResponse.Write(String) overload to get exact representaiton.
Response.Write(endDateDt.ToString("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)); 
DateTimevalue has no format, it is just a value representing a point in time, the format you parsed it from has no bearing on this, it is only used to parse the input string. When you write it back out, either you specify a format, or you get some default format depending on the current culture.