Reading Dates correctly regardless of format

Is there a way to read date time correctly regardless of date format (e.g. en-AU and en-US) in C# 4.0 or whatever framework version?

Below is two different date formats (top row is Australian format, bottom row is US format):

Timestamp,Windows User,Computer,Product,Version,Id,User,Action 
5/04/2011 9:14:16 AM,terryg,KETTSAM51,powerfulSoftware,3.0,0,Garry Terr开发者_如何学Goy,Lock
5/1/2011 12:38:22 PM,weanern,KETTSAM51,powerfulSoftware,3.0,1,Admin,Lock

What I want is to be able to read the dates, and process them all as Australian formatted dates.

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string australiaCultureString = "en-AU";

CultureInfo australiaCulture = new CultureInfo(australiaCultureString);

To read as Australian culture:

DateTime time = DateTime.Parse(inputString, australiaCulture);

To represents Australian date time when call ToString()

string timeString = time.ToString(australiaCulture);

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I don't see a way you could do it, for example, how should this parse:

08/01/2010

That's a valid date in both US and AU formats, so there will always be ambiguity unless you give the parser an extra hint.

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No, you have to know the culture when parsing a date string.

For example,

 DateTime.Parse(dateString, new CultureInfo("en-US", false));

would parse the US date for you, but not the Australian date (unless both cultures happen to use the same date format, of course).