How to get the start and end times of a day

Question

In my C# app, I pass a string variable that is of format yyyymmdd-yyyymmdd that represents a from and to date. I want to get the start and end times for these dates respecti

Answer 1

That's pretty much what I would do, with some small tweaks (really no big deal, just nitpicking):

• The TryParse()/TryParseExact() methods should be used which return false instead of throwing exceptions.
• FormatException is more specific than Exception
• No need to check for Length == 8, because ParseExact()/TryParseExact() will do this
• "00:00:00" and "23:59:59" are not needed
• return true/false is you were able to parse, instead of throwing an exception (remember to check value returned from this method!)

Code:

private bool ValidateDatePeriod(string pdr, out DateTime startDate, 
                        out DateTime endDate)
{
   string[] dates = pdr.Split('-');

   if (dates.Length != 2)
   {
       return false;
   }

   // no need to check for Length == 8 because the following will do it anyway
   // no need for "00:00:00" or "23:59:59" either, I prefer AddDays(1)

   if(!DateTime.TryParseExact(dates[0], "yyyyMMdd", null, DateTimeStyles.None, out startDate))
      return false;

   if(!DateTime.TryParseExact(dates[1], "yyyyMMdd", null, DateTimeStyles.None, out endDate))
      return false;

   endDate = endDate.AddDays(1);
   return true;
}