No Europe time like 18-02-2014 12:00:00, shows 2/18/2014 12:00:00 PM, have choosen Danish in Culture
I get the same result here for 'Swedish', even though AM/PM notation has NEVER been used in this country (except by imported hardware/software). There are ancient long disused Swedish equivalents of AM/PM, these being FM/EM (FörMiddag/EfterMiddag), but like I said, those are long disused.
The modern Swedish usage is to always use 24-hour clock, and while the day/month/year notation is fairly common, the standard usage for most official documents and personal 'birthcodes' is always year.month.day as in 1956.02.21 (my own birthdate btw). The digit group separators can differ though, with common choices being ".", "-", or even none at all (the standard for Swedish ID-codes).
Having the timestamp notation defined by 'culture' makes very little sense to me, since there is diversity in the usage of every culture. It would make much more sense, and add considerable flexibility, if the user was able to define a template for how date and time numbers should be displayed, similar to how we can define templates for the notification messages.
For example, my preferred notation could then be defined by the template:
"YYYY.MM.DD HH:mm:ss"
But a standard template for USA could instead look like this:
"MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss AM/PM"
In such templates the usage of most placeholders is obvious, with the exception of HH, hh, and AM/PM.
Here I intended capital "HH" to stand for 24-hour digits, while lower-case "hh" would stand for 12-hour digits.
And when 12-hour format is specified this way, any space-delimited string following the time-of-day string and containing a "/" character could be interpreted as defining the two indicators for AM and PM, with only one of them actually being displayed for a given timestamp of course.
Given such template usage a more old-fashioned Swede than myself could use a template differing from mine, like this:
"DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm:ss FM/EM"
But if he doesn't care about second-precise timing he could instead use:
"DD/MM/YYYY hh:mm FM/EM"
And the time format BearPlex asked for could be defined as:
"DD-MM-YYYY HH:mm:ss"
And of course, even with such a new template method it would still be possible for the program to use a culture-based table to initialize the template, while also allowing users to then edit that template to suit personal preferences.
Best regards: dlanor
