Create custom DateTime format respective of locality in .NET C#

Question

So this seems like an easy thing to do, but still has me stumped. I want to display a list of strings to my user, based off of a few file's creation dates. So basically, display a list of DateTimes. The challenge is that want to use a custom format (something like 5/6/13 12:01 PM) but I want he date part of that to display differently based on how you have your system displaying the date (ie. a Brit would display that date as 6/5/13).

I thought I could just build two strings (one for date and one for time) and make sure that they date is region-formatted, but there is no default option for 5/6/13 (only 5/6/2013): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az4se3k1.aspx

Next I hoped maybe the DateTime.ToShortDateString() function would work, but it displays as 5/6/2013 as well.

I know I can use a completely custom format like this: DateTime.ToString("M/d/yy h:mm tt") but I don't want to fix the date with the month before the day.

I suppose if I can' figure anything out then I could just build a custom datetime for America and for Europe and then query the OS for what datetime they are displaying in. But that seems really excessive. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

System.Globalization.CultureInfo implements IFormatProvider, so you can provide a CultureInfo object as a parameter to the ToString method.

MSDN seems to have an example of exactly what you want.

Answer 2

You could retrieve the current ShortDate format from current culture, change it and use it with ToString()

var currentDate = DateTime.Now;
var shortDateFormat = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern;
var newShortDateFormat = shortDateFormat.Replace("yyyy", "yy");
Console.WriteLine(currentDate.ToString(shortDateFormat));
Console.WriteLine(currentDate.ToString(newShortDateFormat));