Is there a standard date/time format that can be passed on a URL?

Question

Looking at the DateTimeFormatInfo documentation, it appears that all the standard formats have colons in them, which makes passing them on a url unpleasant/impossible.

Answer 1

I'll put everything together into one answer:

You could do something like this:

        string urlSafeDateString = HttpServerUtility.UrlTokenEncode(date.ToUniversalTime().ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).ToCharArray());

        DateTime date = DateTime.Parse(new string(HttpServerUtility.UrlTokenDecode(urlSafeDateString)), System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).ToLocalTime();

Or you could do something like this:

        string urlSafeDateString = date.ToUniversalTime().ToString("yyyyMMddTHHmmss", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

        DateTime date = DateTime.ParseExact(urlSafeDateString, "yyyyMMddTHHmmss", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture).ToLocalTime();