Working with date and time values often requires an ability to
convert these values into string values in a particular format. In this
article, I’ll look at a simple way of converting these values into formatted strings.
Working with standard format strings
You can convert a Date/Time
value into a string by overloading a version of the ToString
method, which accepts a format string.
There are two types of Date/Time format strings: standard and
custom. The standard format strings use one of the predefined formats and are
specified by a letter corresponding to a particular format. When converting a
Date/Time value to a string, the letter specifying one of the standard formats
is used to refer to a particular format specifier.
Here’s a list of the standard date format specifiers:
- d: short date
- D: long date
- t: short time
- T: long time
- f: full Date/Time with short time
- F: full Date/Time with long time
- g: general Date/Time with short
time - G: general Date/Time with long
time - M or m: month day
- R or r: RFC1123
- s: sortable
Date/Time that conforms to ISO 8601 - u: universal sortable
Date/Time - U: full Date/Time with long time.
(This format is the same as F, but it uses universal GMT time.) - Y or y: year month
Control Panel settings
The settings in the Control Panel’s Regional and Language
Options section influence the result you get when formatting a Date/Time value.
The settings are used to initialize the DateTimeFormatInfo object, which is associated with the current thread culture and provides
the values that control the formatting.
Dim dateTimeInfo as DateTime = DateTime.Now
MessageBox.Show (dateTimeInfo)
Dim strMonth as String = dateTimeInfo.ToString("m")
MessageBox.Show(strMonth)
The code defines the DateTime variable dateTimeInfo and sets its value
to the current Date/Time. Then, I define the String variable strMonth and convert the value of dateTimeInfo into a String in a Month format.
Custom Date/Time format specifiers
You can also create custom format strings when the available
standard format strings don’t satisfy your needs. A custom Date/Time format
string consists of one or more custom Date/Time format specifiers
and defines how the Date/Time data would be formatted. For a full list of
custom format specifiers, visit MSDN.
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