Odd Result Date/Time Format - Powershell

Question

I'm passing a string that represents a date i.e. 20180625 to my Powershell script.

I'm then taking the string parameter, which is called $currentDate and formatting it as follows:

$date = [datetime]::ParseExact($currentDate,"yyyyMMdd",$null)

However, when I write the $date variable out it's displaying as 6/29/2018 12:00:00 AM.

I'm doing this because I need to get the day of the year for my script:

$dayofyear = ($date).dayofyear

Which works. I just expected the $date to be in the yyyyMMdd format. Just curious as to why this is happening.

EBGreen · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-29 19:45:53Z

3

The format parameter for ParseExact tells the parser what format the date you are giving it is in. The object you get back is a DateTime object not a string. To get the string in the format that you want, use the .ToString() method then give if the format that you want the string to be in.

As an example:

$currentDate = '20180629'
$date = [datetime]::ParseExact($currentDate,"yyyyMMdd",$null)
$dayOfYear = $date.DayOfYear
$date.ToString('yyyyMMdd')

edited Jun 29, 2018 at 19:45

answered Jun 29, 2018 at 19:13

EBGreen

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Comments

Jacob Colvin · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-29 19:15:47Z

$date is an object of type [datetime] which contains an exact measure of time in ticks. For instance, a timespan of 1 day would be 864000000000 ticks. Thus it is not possible to have $null values in a lesser field (864 ticks would only be a few milliseconds). $date prints to the console with a default formatting, which can be changed. However, since each field down to -Milliseconds is populated as 0, when that default format does contain fields such as -hours, they will be displayed as the minimum value (in this case, 12am exactly).

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