Twitter's REST timelines (public, friends, users) return created_at dates in a way C# can't natively parse, so they have to be reformatted. Apparently, this format is whatever comes out of Ruby. Here's my solution, elegance not included.
public static string ReformatTwitterDate(string twitterDate)
{
// twitter date: "Sat Apr 11 05:22:54 +0000 2009"
// DateTime.Parse()'able date: "Sat, Apr 11 2009 05:22:54 +0000"
MatchCollection c = Regex.Matches(twitterDate, @"\w+");
return string.Format("{0}, {1} {2} {7} {3}:{4}:{5} +{6}", c[0], c[1], c[2], c[3], c[4], c[5], c[6], c[7]);
}
... or (without regexp) ..
public string ReformatTwitterDate2(string twitterDate)
{
string[] c = twitterDate.Split(' ');
return string.Format("{0}, {1} {2} {5} {3} {4}", c[0], c[1], c[2], c[3], c[4], c[5]);
}
And yes, they know the Search API's date format is different.