Sometimes, date and time information is not formatted according to the standards PowerShell understands by default. When this happens, you can provide a hint and tell PowerShell how to correctly interpret date and time.
In this example, $information contains date and time information in a highly unusual format:
$information = '12Nov(2012)18h30m17s' $pattern = 'ddMMM\(yyyy\)HH\hmm\mss\s' [datetime]::ParseExact($information, $pattern, $null)
By providing the pattern in $pattern, PowerShell can still correctly interpret it. Note that the placeholders in $pattern are case-sensitive. "MMM" represents a short month name, whereas "mm" stands for minutes. The backslash escapes literals (text information that does not belong to the date and time format, for example braces or descriptive text).
