Is there a culture-safe way to get ToShortDateString() and ToShortTimeString() with leading zeros?

Question

I know that I could use a format string, but I don\'t want to lose the culture specific representation of the date/time format. E.g.

5/4/2011 | 2:06 PM | ...

Answer 1

You could also override the CurrentThread.CurrentCulture class. At the beginning of your program you call this method:

    private void FixCurrentDateFormat()
    {
        var cc = (System.Globalization.CultureInfo)System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.Clone();
        var df = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat;
        df.FullDateTimePattern = PatchPattern(df.FullDateTimePattern);
        df.LongDatePattern = PatchPattern(df.LongDatePattern);
        df.ShortDatePattern = PatchPattern(df.ShortDatePattern);
        //change any other patterns that you could use

        //replace the current culture with the patched culture
        System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = cc;
    }

    private string PatchPattern(string pattern)
    {
        //modify the pattern to your liking here
        //in this example, I'm replacing "d" with "dd" and "M" with "MM"
        var newPattern = Regex.Replace(pattern, @"\bd\b", "dd");
        newPattern = Regex.Replace(newPattern, @"\bM\b", "MM");
        return newPattern;
    }

With this, anywhere you display a date as a string in your program it will have the new format.