"Assign: String was not recognized as a valid DateTime."

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Hi everyone,

I’ve been trying to figure this one out for a while now but don’t get it to work. I hope somebody here can help me solve the problem.

I’m trying to convert a string to a DateTime type.

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My process starts with the Get Text Activity which saves the text (e.g. “January 2021”) from a website in the variable jDate.

This works out just fine and I can write out a line in the console which prints out “January 2021”

Next, I’d like to convert this string to the DateTime format. I used the assign activity and created a variable called dateInput of the type DateTime for that:

dateInput = DateTime.ParseExact(jDate, “MMMM yyyy”, System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)

Here I get the error: “Assign: String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.”

I tried the same process without Get text activity and I assigned the variable jDate the value January 2021 and it worked fine. Is it possible that the GetText activity doesn’t save it as a string but a generic value and has therefore to be coverted? If yes, please let me know how to do that.

Does anyone know how to solve this issue?

Cheers Tim

2

Can you try to trim jDate first? Maybe there are some extra spaces in the beginning or in the end

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Also instead of using InvariantCulture you could use a specific culture. e.g.
DateTime.ParseExact(“January 2021”, “MMMM yyyy”,new System.Globalization.CultureInfo(“us-US”))

4

DateTime requires day, month and year. Where is your day?

Force some day to your string:

DateTime.ParseExact(jDate + " 01", "MMMM yyyy dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)

5

Day is not required for ParseExact to work. The OP’s code is correct. It seems like there is some extra string in the value he gets from Get Text activity.

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@KannanSuresh you are right!

It automatically assumes the day 01.

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Trimming worked perfectly. Thanks for the help!

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