Does the date conversion always remain in en-BR?

Question

I’m trying to convert a date in Asp.Net MVC to yyyy-MM-dd, what happens is that always when I convert and display this date it gets dd/MM/yyyy and I don’t know why it happens.

How to solve this?

String d1 = `2019-03-01`;
DateTime d = DateTime.Parse(d1);
Debug.Writeline(d);

Resultado: saida 01/03/2019

Answer 1

^{As I said before here and here:}

Dates have no format

A date is just a concept, an idea: it represents a specific point in the calendar.

The date of "1 March 2019" represents this: the specific point of the calendar, which corresponds to the 1st of March of the year 2019. To express this idea in text form, I can write it in different ways:

• 01/03/2019 (a common format in many countries, including Brazil)
• 3/1/2019 (American format, reversing day and month)
• 2019-03-01 (the format ISO 8601)
• 1st of March 2019 (in good Portuguese)
• March 1^st, 2019 (in English)
• 2019 年 3 月 1 日 (in Japanese)
• and many others...

Note that each of the above formats is different, but all represent the same date (the same numerical values of the day, month and year).

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That said, the string 2019-03-01 is just a text that represents the date in a specific format. When you turn this string into a DateTime, is creating an object that contains the respective values (day 1, month 3, year 2019). But the date itself is not in a specific format.

When you print the date, of course, it has to be shown in some format. Methods like WriteLine, on receiving a DateTime, use a default format as per CurrentCulture (see detailed explanation here).

If you want to use a specific format without relying on CurrentCulture (or without needing to change it), use ToString(formato). Example:

d.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd") // retorna 2019-03-01

Remembering that this method returns a string: a representation of the date in a specific format, not the date (the DateTime) in itself.

Answer 2

This happens because you are not formatting the output. A date has no format, what is formatted is representation of this date in string.

It is possible to set the format of a date using the . tostring method()

Debug.Writeline(d.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd"));

In this case, the culture won’t make any difference, so I omitted it. In general it is always good to use it, even for reasons of custom and/ or maintenance of code (if someone changes the format, etc.).

Answer 3

Try to do:

string d1 = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd");

Or else if that’s the case:

d1.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("pt-BR"));

Answer 4

You can make explicit the date format you want on output using Parseexact():

public Static Datetime Parseexact (string s, string format, Iformatprovider Provider);

More information:

Datetime.Parseexact Method

CultureInfo culture = new CultureInfo("en-US");
string d1 = "2019-03-01";
string format = "yyyy-MM-dd";

DateTime dateTime = DateTime.ParseExact(d1, format, culture);