Changing Datelist order

Question

Im wondering how can I formulate a function which receives input in the string format "day.month.year hours: minutes: seconds" (for example, "10.12.2012 3:25:05") and returns the time in the form of {year, month, day, hour, min, sec}.

I guess a start is

 datelist[{"10.12.2012 03:25:05", {"Day", "Month", "Year", "Hour", "Minute", "Second"}}]

but how do I continue?

Answer 1

I'm not sure I understand your problem. Apart from the incorrect capitalization of the function name your suggested input

DateList[{"10.12.2012 03:25:05", {"Day", "Month", "Year", "Hour", "Minute", "Second"}}]

{2012, 12, 10, 3, 25, 5.}

seems to do exactly what you want.

Rolling that into a function is rather trivial:

ClearAll[dateConvert]
dateConvert[date_String] := 
        DateList[{date, {"Day", "Month", "Year", "Hour", "Minute",   "Second"}}]