How to Parse DateTimes from the Twitter API
If you were wanting to interact with the Twitter API under .NET, you might find yourself trying to convert a date value from the XML results over to a DateTime in your code. Twitter uses a weird format for their dates—Thu Sep 04 11:09:28 +0000 2008—that doesn't get converted properly with just a good ol' DateTime.Parse. You could spend a lot of time iteratively trying to figure out the correct format to use. Or, you could just use the following (my free gift to you, dear Twitter-API-consuming reader):
DateTime.ParseExact((directMessage.SelectSingleNode("//created_at").InnerText), "ddd MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzzz yyyy", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, DateTimeStyles.AdjustToUniversal);
directMessage here is an XmlNode representing a single direct message extracted from a list of direct messages. I found this out after many iterations since all of the .NET libraries for Twitter just punt on this conversion.
Wow -- how much hair pulling did that require? I've never even HEARD of 'ParseExact'.
-D
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I knew about ParseExact. The big problem was figuring out the format stuff—I had never seen 'zzzz' before. It makes sense when you think about it, but I just couldn't get it right. And the way parsing works is completely binary, so there's no feedback about what part you got wrong. But now it's solved and I don't have to think about it any more.
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