Trouble with converting to Datetime object

Solution 1:

You can use the the ParseExact() method provided by the [datetime] class for this:

[datetime]::ParseExact('Fri Jan 14 20:58:09','ddd MMM dd HH:mm:ss',$null)

# returns a - datetime - object of:
# Friday, January 14, 2022 8:58:09 PM

• dd - for the day.
• MM - for the month.
• HH - for the hour - Capitalized for the 24 hour time format.
• mm - for the minutes.
• ss - for the seconds.

Edit: as suggested by mklement0, we can use [cultureinfo]::InvariantCulture to make the parsing specific to an English date time format. Also, changing dd to d as a more robust solution for days without 2 digits; which should cover both singular, and double digit days.

Seeing $timestamps is an array of strings, you can use a loop (of your choice - in this case the Foreach-Object cmdlet) to iterate through each string parsing the text to return a datetime object:

$timestamps | ForEach-Object {
    $culture = [cultureinfo]::InvariantCulture
    $format  = 'ddd MMM d HH:mm:ss'
    $date = [datetime]::ParseExact($_,$format,$culture,'AssumeUniversal, AdjustToUniversal')
    [System.TimeZoneInfo]::ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId($date, 'Eastern Standard Time')
}

• Using 'AssumeUniversal, AdjustToUniversal' ensures a UTC output.

Assuming from your comment that you'd like to do a conversion to Eastern Time, passing the newly created datetime object to [System.TimeZoneInfo]::ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId() with an argument of the desired time zone, you can get your result in the new time zone.

When using $null, the CultureInfo object that corresponds to the current culture is used.