How to get the start and end times of a day

Question

In my C# app, I pass a string variable that is of format yyyymmdd-yyyymmdd that represents a from and to date. I want to get the start and end times for these dates respectively. Currently I have the below code but was wondering if there was more of an elegant solution?

So for pdr = 20090521-20090523 would get "20090521 00:00:00" and "20090523 23:59:59"

private void ValidateDatePeriod(string pdr, out DateTime startDate,                                  out DateTime endDate) {     string[] dates = pdr.Split('-');      if (dates.Length != 2)     {         throw new Exception("Date period is of incorrect format");     }      if (dates[0].Length != 8 || dates[1].Length != 8)     {         throw new Exception("Split date periods are of incorrect format");     }      startDate = DateTime.ParseExact(dates[0] + " 00:00:00",          "yyyyMMdd HH:mm:ss", null);     endDate = DateTime.ParseExact(dates[1] + "23:59:59",          "yyyyMMdd HH::mm:ss", null); } 

Answer 1

I am surprised to see how an incorrect answer received so many upvotes:

The correct version would be as follows:

public static DateTime StartOfDay(this DateTime theDate) {     return theDate.Date; }  public static DateTime EndOfDay(this DateTime theDate) {     return theDate.Date.AddDays(1).AddTicks(-1); }