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

I wrote a method to do that kind of transformations :

/// 

/// Transform DateTime into short specified format
/// 
/// string : input DateTime
/// 
/// string - optional : ouput format - default "d"
/// 
public static string ConvertDateTimeToShortDate(string strDateTime, CultureInfo cultureInfo, string strFormat="d")
{
  var dateTime = DateTime.MinValue;
  return DateTime.TryParse(strDateTime, out dateTime) ? dateTime.ToString(strFormat, cultureInfo) : strDateTime;
}

To call it, for time format :

DateTimeTools.ConvertDateTimeToShortDate(DateTime.Today.ToString(),
            CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,"t");

Hope it can help u