datetime.parse and making it work with a specific format

Question

I have a datetime coming back from an XML file in the format:

20080916 11:02

as in

yyyymm hh:ss

How can I get the datetime.parse function to pick up on this? Ie parse it without erroring?

Answer 1

DateTime.ParseExact(input,"yyyyMMdd HH:mm",null);

assuming you meant to say that minutes followed the hours, not seconds - your example is a little confusing.

The ParseExact documentation details other overloads, in case you want to have the parse automatically convert to Universal Time or something like that.

As @Joel Coehoorn mentions, there's also the option of using TryParseExact, which will return a Boolean value indicating success or failure of the operation - I'm still on .Net 1.1, so I often forget this one.

If you need to parse other formats, you can check out the Standard DateTime Format Strings.