How can I parse dates with a suffix "th", "st" or "nd" on the day of the month?

Question

I'm having trouble using DateTime.Parse

I'm handling a variety of formats of dates and some of which are of the formatJanuary 11th or February 22nd and so on.

DateTime.Parse throws an exception trying to parse these sort of dates.

I was wondering if there is a built in functionality in DateTime that I am missing, like a flag I can set that will make Parse behave in a more acceptable way.

I am aware that this is solvable with a relatively simple regular expression, moreover I already have a class that fuzzy matches dates that I wrote, however I would like to know if there is a built in way to perform this sort of extraction since it will more likely be easier to maintain in the long run than reinventing the wheel.

Answer 1

I had similar problem here's better way

  stringdate="August 19th 2000" 
  string pattern = @"\b(\d+)(?:st|nd|rd|th)\b";
  Regex rgx = new Regex(pattern);
  DateTime.Parse(String.Format("{0:MMMM,  d, yyyy}", rgx.Replace(stringdate, "$1"))  
  **result**    {19/08/2000 00:00:00}   System.DateTime

From Microsoft and regex to remove ordinals and How can I visualize the way various DateTime formats will display?

EDIT

If the year is not specified:

    stringdate= rgx.Replace(stringdate, "$1");
    DateTime datetime;
    if (!DateTime.TryParseExact(stringdate, "MMMM dd yyyy", System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo.InvariantInfo, System.Globalization.DateTimeStyles.None, out datetime))
    {
     // assuming no gap exist
     datetime = DateTime.Parse(stringdate += " "+DateTime.Now.Year);
    }

Now if the input string text is "June 11th", it will be 11/6/2021.

There are More functions and ways to handle dates at DateTime Documentation.

If you dont want the year at all, then you can add the following line:

datetime.ToString("MM/dd");

Now the output will be "11/6"