Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Second Edition

Parsing dates

The Get-Date command is the best first stop for converting strings into dates. Get-Date deals with a reasonable number of formats.

If, however, Get-Date is unable to help, the DateTime class has two static methods that may be used:

• ParseExact
• TryParseExact

The format strings used by these methods are documented on MSDN:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4(v=vs.110).aspx

The ParseExact method accepts one or more format strings and returns a DateTime object:

$string = '20170102-2030'  # Represents 1st February 2017, 20:30 
[DateTime]::ParseExact($string, 'yyyyddMM-HHmm', (Get-Culture)) 

The culture, returned from Get-Culture, used previously, fills in the format provider argument.

The format string uses:

• yyyy to ...