Sean, It's happened again - please can I have a link to today's (9th December) mail to see what all the fuss is about?

It's a very good job that Symantec doesn't live with me. I say Bu**er all the time, and far worse. I would be severely censored if it did :laugh:

I got a message from Big Brother (Symantec) telling me that they had blocked the Daily News today (22nd October) because of "Profanity". I clicked on yesterday's email on the "View Online" link hoping I would find a page with a list of links to all news emails - so I could see what was said - but failed to find it. Could someone please tell me the online link to this news email so I can see what the fuss is about. At 71 I think I am old enough and broad minded enough to make my own decisions!!! Geoff

I appreciate your reply, it is a human format. This is raw data which originates from written documents, once upon a time they were handed copied, then scanned, now I get it electronically, but it from a printed document intended to be read by real people! My program is reading this raw data and immediately converting it into a useful computer format so I can use it - but I have to take the original data in the format it is written. Thanks to your help I have now got this initial conversion code working in at least one path - just hit another, but now I know how to fix it then it is just a slog to spot all the conversion paths.. My step backwards remark is aimed at Microsoft - backwards compatibility is something they often don't rate too highly. Thanks again.... TOPSie

Thanks for this - what a giant leap - backwards. If I understand this then 7 November 1993 has a format string of "d MMMM YYYY" But all my dates (and the data has LOTS of them) are in the format 7th November 1993. I can find nothing in your link that shows me a format to cope with "th" (or "st" or "rd"). I presume I am going to have to strip these out of the input string myself - being careful with AuguST etc. As I said a great leap forward - one line of code turns in to 10 or more!!! STOP PRESS The original error was in DateTime.Parse coping with "7th November 1993" Following your link I tried ParseExact with a format string of "d MMMM YYYY" after stripping the "th" out. But ParseExact returned an error. However going back to just Parse with no "th" in the date string now seems to work. Thanks again TOPSie -- modified at 13:25 Friday 29th June, 2007 TOPSie

I have an application that has worked happily for many years under VB2003. Today I upgraded it to VB2005 with no upgrade issues or changes. The following line now fails dim datestr as string = "7thNovember1993" dim datedate as date datedate = System.DateTime.Parse(datestr) VB2005 throws The string was not recognized as a valid DateTime. There is a unknown word starting at index 1. TOPSie