And going one step further, if I'm looping through a datatable of dates, running the TryParse option, how will the computer know if "3/5/2008" should be 3rd May 2008 or 5th March 2008?
Once you got the data, you will store it in an appropriate data type.
DateTime[
^] will do in your software, some similar data type should exist in every DBMS. Or, at least, you formatted the data. So you will know what it means.
To get there, provide a culture for every supplier.
bool success = DateTime.TryParse(
suppliedDateString,
new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("fr-FR"),
System.Globalization.DateTimeStyles.None,
out suppliedDate
);
You can get the culture identification strings ("fr-FR") from
here[
^].
Or use
DateTime.TryParseExact()[
^] with different formatting for every supplier.