How can I get date and time formats based on Culture Info?

What I want is..
If culture is en-US then

string dateFormat="MM/dd/yyyy"; 
string timeFormat="24.00 hrs";

If culture is en-GB then

string dateFormat="dd/mmyyyy"; 
string timeFormat="24.00 hrs";

and so on for other countries..

Now how do I get these date and time format values ? What are the standards? Like which all countries use similar date/time formats and which ones don’t ?

ok I tried this :-

 DateTime myDate = new DateTime();
   string us = myDate.ToString(new CultureInfo("en-US"));

string us gets value =1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM

Now how do I extract “dd/mm/yyyy” and “24.00 hrs” out of this…in my Dateformat column in my Table… I want to store STRINGS such as dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy NOT dates..In my TimeFormat column in the table, the values to be stores are STRINGS too, like I need to store either “24:00hrs” or “12:00hrs”

How do I do this now ?

**using ShorTimePattern returns these values as

h:mm tt and HH:mm

If I want to store the values in my DB exactly as “24:00hrs” and “12:00hrs”, how do I use these values..h:mm tt and HH:mm
which one is for 24 hr format and which for 12 hr format ?**

ok now there’s another problem too…I want the information about Decimal Separator and Thousand Separator too based on the CultureInfo…whats the property for that ?

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

You can retrieve the format strings from the CultureInfo DateTimeFormat property, which is a DateTimeFormatInfo instance. This in turn has properties like ShortDatePattern and ShortTimePattern, containing the format strings:

CultureInfo us = new CultureInfo("en-US");
string shortUsDateFormatString = us.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern;
string shortUsTimeFormatString = us.DateTimeFormat.ShortTimePattern;

CultureInfo uk = new CultureInfo("en-GB");
string shortUkDateFormatString = uk.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern;
string shortUkTimeFormatString = uk.DateTimeFormat.ShortTimePattern;

If you simply want to format the date/time using the CultureInfo, pass it in as your IFormatter when converting the DateTime to a string, using the ToString method:

string us = myDate.ToString(new CultureInfo("en-US"));
string uk = myDate.ToString(new CultureInfo("en-GB"));

Method 2

// Try this may help

string us = DateTime.Now.Date.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy",new CultureInfo("en-US"));

or

 string us = DateTime.Now.Date.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy",new CultureInfo("en-GB"));

Method 3

You could take a look at the DateTimeFormat property which contains the culture specific formats.

Method 4

Use a CultureInfo like this, from MSDN:

// Creates a CultureInfo for German in Germany.
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo("de-DE");

// Displays dt, formatted using the CultureInfo
Console.WriteLine(dt.ToString(ci));

More info on MSDN. Here is a link of all different cultures.

Method 5

Try setting a custom CultureInfo for CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture:

Globalization.CultureInfo customCulture = new Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US", true);

customCulture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = "yyyy-MM-dd h:mm tt";

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = customCulture;
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = customCulture;

DateTime newDate = System.Convert.ToDateTime(DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd h:mm tt"));

Method 6

Culture can be changed for a specific cell in grid view.

<%# DateTime.ParseExact(Eval("contractdate", "{0}"), "MM/dd/yyyy", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).ToString("dd/MM/yyyy", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture) %>

For more detail check the link.

Date Format Issue in Gridview binding with #eval()

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0