How to produce localized date string with CultureInfo

Keith picture Keith · Apr 27, 2011 · Viewed 49.4k times · Source

I have the following code that produces a date string in en-us format. I would like to pass in the LCID (or equivalent value for the localized language) to produce the localized version of the date string. How would I accomplish this?

public static string ConvertDateTimeToDate(string dateTimeString) {

    CultureInfo culture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;
    DateTime dt = DateTime.MinValue;

    if (DateTime.TryParse(dateTimeString, out dt))
    {
        return dt.ToShortDateString();
    }
    return dateTimeString;
  }

Answer

davidsleeps picture davidsleeps · Apr 27, 2011

You can use the second argument to the toString function and use any language/culture you need...

You can use the "d" format instead of ToShortDateString according to MSDN...

So basically something like this to return as Australian English:

CultureInfo enAU = new CultureInfo("en-AU");
dt.ToString("d", enAU);

you could modify your method to include the language and culture as a parameter

public static string ConvertDateTimeToDate(string dateTimeString, String langCulture) {

    CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo(langCulture);
    DateTime dt = DateTime.MinValue;

    if (DateTime.TryParse(dateTimeString, out dt))
    {
        return dt.ToString("d",culture);
    }
    return dateTimeString;
  }

Edit
You may also want to look at the overloaded tryParse method if you need to parse the string against a particular language/culture...