Is there a standard date/time format that can be passed on a URL?

Question

Looking at the DateTimeFormatInfo documentation, it appears that all the standard formats have colons in them, which makes passing them on a url unpleasant/impossible.

Is there a standardized format for passing a datetime on a url, preferably one that can be automatically parsed by .NET?

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Update: A little clarification

The consumer of this data is going to be web service of some kind - it'll either be a simple HTTP GET with this value in the querystring, or it'll be REST with the value in the url somewhere.

ISO 8601 governs date/time formatting, and according to the wiki article, using ToString("yyyyMMddTHHmmssZ") should be standards-compliant at least. Unfortunately, it doesn't get picked up automatically by ASP.NET MVC (haven't tried anything else yet). For what it's worth, ASP.NET MVC won't automatically convert ticks to a datetime either, which surprised me.

Answer 1

I'll put everything together into one answer:

You could do something like this:

        string urlSafeDateString = HttpServerUtility.UrlTokenEncode(date.ToUniversalTime().ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).ToCharArray());

        DateTime date = DateTime.Parse(new string(HttpServerUtility.UrlTokenDecode(urlSafeDateString)), System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).ToLocalTime();

Or you could do something like this:

        string urlSafeDateString = date.ToUniversalTime().ToString("yyyyMMddTHHmmss", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

        DateTime date = DateTime.ParseExact(urlSafeDateString, "yyyyMMddTHHmmss", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).ToLocalTime();

Answer 2

Yes. ISO 8601

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Just make sure you URLEncode it to deal with the colons.