End date 24:00 (midnight)

Question

I have a client who wants to see the midnight presented at the end of the previous day.

Example

var date = DateTime.Parse("1/27/2010 0:00"); Console.WriteLine(date.ToString(<some format>)); 

Display:

 1/26/2010 24:00 

I believe that this is valid in the ISO 8601 standard. ( See this )

Is there a way to support this in .net (without ugly string manipulation)?

Answer 1

I think for dates you will need a custom formatter. See the IFormatProvider and ICustomFormatter interfaces.

This and this can also help.

Answer 2

You can customize the extension method, although using IFormatProvider as suggested by Lucero would probably be the appropriate approach. The extension method is compared with the Date property of Date , which returns the date when the time component is set to midnight. It would be like this:

 public static class Extensions { public static string ToCustomFormat(this DateTime date) { if (date.TimeOfDay < TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1)) { return date.AddDays(-1).ToString("MM/dd/yyyy") + " 24:00"; } return date.ToString("MM/dd/yyyy H:mm"); } } 

Then call it using:

 var date = DateTime.Parse("1/27/2010 0:00"); Console.WriteLine(date.ToCustomFormat()); 

EDIT: Updated for comments.