Solving Date Parsing Issues: How to Handle Regional Format Differences in Linx

How To
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Date Parsing Issues: Understanding Regional Settings and Format Specifications in Linx

When working with date data from external APIs or systems, you may encounter situations where dates are not being interpreted correctly. A common scenario is when a date like “1-12-2025” is read as January 12th instead of December 1st, leading to incorrect calculations and logic errors.

Why This Happens

Linx (and any application) interprets dates based on the regional/locale settings of the machine it’s running on.

When your external system sends a date in DD-MM-YYYY format (e.g., “1-12-2025” meaning December 1st, 2025), but your server is configured with MM-DD-YYYY regional settings, Linx will interpret this as January 12th, 2025.

This is not a Linx-specific issue—it’s how date parsing works at the system level across all programming languages and platforms.

The Solution: Explicit Format Specification

To resolve this, use Linx’s ToDateTime() method with explicit format specification:

Basic Format Conversion

MyDate.ToDateTime("dd-MM-yyyy HH: mm:ss")

This tells Linx exactly how to interpret your date string, regardless of the server’s regional settings.

Handling Variable Day/Month Formats

Many APIs send dates with single-digit days or months (e.g., “1-12-2025” instead of “01-12-2025”), which can cause conversion errors when using format specifiers that expect two digits.

Solution: Use a conditional expression to handle both single and double-digit formats:

MyDate.IndexOf("-")==1?("0"+MyDate).ToDateTime("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss"):MyDate.ToDateTime("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm: ss")

This expression:

  1. Checks if the first dash appears at position 1 (indicating a single-digit day)
  2. If true, adds a leading “0” before conversion
  3. If false, converts the date as-is

Note that this is only one example of how you can solve this, there are other possiibilities and you need to identify what will work best for your solution and strategy.

Practical Example

Input from API: “1-12-2025 00:00:00”
Expected: December 1st, 2025
Expression: MyDate.IndexOf("-")==1?("0"+MyDate).ToDateTime("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss"):MyDate.ToDateTime("dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss")
Result: Correctly parsed as December 1st, 2025

Best Practices

  1. Always specify the format when working with external date data
  2. Test with your actual data to identify single vs. double-digit scenarios
  3. Use ISO format (yyyy-MM-dd) when possible for unambiguous parsing
  4. Document the expected format from your data sources

This approach ensures your Linx solutions work consistently across different environments and server configurations.