As mentioned in the ADF-Representation Post, I work with Jira daily. In doing so, I often process emails to extract details for creating New-Jira issues.

Recently, I shared my New-Jira script with a colleague in the US, who encountered an error that I didn’t have. Here’s a review of the issue and the solution I found, which might be useful for you.

The Original PowerShell Script

# Convert MMddYYYYtime to ddMMYYYYtime using regex groups
$MMddYYYYtime = $activityObject.'Created Date' -replace 'Created Date : '
$ddMMYYYYtime = $MMddYYYYtime -replace '(\d{1,2}/)(\d{1,2}/)(.*)', '$2$1$3'
$activityObject.'Created Date' = Get-Date $ddMMYYYYtime

Explanation

$activityObject represents an email object, specifically a PSCustomObject that holds text extracted from an email body. This data is generated in PowerShell using the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook assembly to read body text from my email, which is a new issue notification from our Siebel ticketing system.

One of the properties of $activityObject is "Created Date", with a value like Created Date : 7/22/2024 10:49:13 AM. This format (month/day/year time) caused the problem with my original script.

Line #1: Uses -replace 'Created Date : ' to trim the descriptive detail, leaving a string representing a DateTime value. 1

Line #2: Uses -replace with regex groups to reorder the month/day portions of the string to appear as day/month.

Line #3: Updates the ‘Created Date’ property with the Get-Date function.

While this worked on my en-IE locale system, it failed on an en-US locale system at line #3. The Get-Date $ddMMYYYYtime command caused an error in the en-US locale system, so I went hunting for a solution. The solution found is the .NET [DateTime]::ParseExact() method.

Now for the goodies, the solution. Hope you find it useful.

# Convert MMddYYYYtime to DateTime using [DateTime]::ParseExact method
$MMddYYYYtime = '7/22/2024 1:49:13 PM'
$template = 'M/d/yyyy h:mm:ss tt'
$activityObject.'Created Date' = [DateTime]::ParseExact($MMddYYYYtime, $template, $null)

The “tt” in the format string represents the AM/PM designator. 2

Conclusion

Using the .NET [DateTime]::ParseExact() method provides a reliable way to parse DateTime strings across different locale settings. 3

Footnotes

  1. You could also use the String.Trim() or String.TrimStart() methods, but these are slower when measured using Measure-Command{}. ↩

  2. ‘tt’ is a custom format specifier that represents the AM/PM designator. More information: ttSpecifier ↩

  3. More information on DateTime.ParseExact can be found here: parseexact ↩

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