Take control of DateTime’s ToString() method.

Today I had to write to the database a string that satisfies  following format: DDMMYYYY-CountryCode.  For example if DateTime object equal to 06/19/2008 and country code is USA, the value written to the database must be “06192008-USA“. 

The best way I found to do that is to use ToString() method of DateTime object with custom date and time format.

someDate.ToString("MMddyyy-") + CountryCode;

NOTE: In the format above I used two ‘M’s and two ‘d’s.  If only one ‘M’ and one ‘d’ was used, no month or date would be padded with zero.

someDate.ToString("Mdyyy-") + CountryCode;

The output for the code above would be “6192008-USA” assuming that the date is 06/19/2008 and the country code is USA.

UPDATE: I had to change the lines of code above because it had a bug.  Thanks to Alexey Romanov for pointing it out.  I put one line of code for the world to see and it was buggy.

The previous code looked like this:

someDate.ToString(String.Format("MMddyyy-{0}"), CountryCode);

Let assume that CountryCode is MEX.  In this case it’s the same as:

someDate.ToString("MMddyyy-MEX");

Remember that “M” is a special character for DateTime object.  The output for this code would be “06192008-6EX“.  It definitely is a problem.