DateTime parsing

Question

I am writing a syslog server that receives syslog messages and stores them in a database.

I am trying to parse the date string received in the message into a DateTime structure.

For the following examples, I'll be using an underscore in place of whitespace for clarity; the actual strings received have spaces.

The string I received is in the format "Jun__7_08:09:10" - please note the two whitespaces between the month and day.

If the day is after the 10th, the strings become "Jun_10_08:09:10" (one whitespace).

If I parse with:

DateTime.ParseExact(Log.Date, "MMM  d HH:mm:ss", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

it works for strings from the 1st to 9th but throws exception from the 10th forward, and if I parse with one space, it throws an exception on the 1st to 9th (and works from the 10th on).

What is the correct way to parse this string?

Answer 1

Consider using this line:

DateTime.ParseExact(Log.Date,
    "MMM d HH:mm:ss",
    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
    DateTimeStyles.AllowWhiteSpaces);

Notice that I removed one of the spaces between the month and the day. That's because AllowWhiteSpaces literally means:

Specifies that s may contain leading, inner, and trailing white spaces not defined by format.

Answer 2

Use the DateTime.ParseExact overload that takes an array of format strings:

DateTime.ParseExact(Log.Date, 
                    new [] {"MMM  d HH:mm:ss", "MMM d HH:mm:ss"}, 
                    CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
                    DateTimeStyles.None);