I'm working on an App which will be used in several countries. We need to store several dates in a character field in our System Preferences table, so I assumed dtos(MyDate) would be the same no matter what format users have for dates. Easy, so far.

Unfortunately, we need to use those dates AS dates, and I can't find a simple way to return the '19971031' format to a date variable in the same date format as the user's Windows. I need a function that reverses dtos(). I've written a work-around by changing date format to AMERICAN and then re-setting it to the user's preference, but there HAS to be a simpler, more elegant way.

Different users on the same site may use different date formats :-(

Ideas? Or have I missed an obvious function when I looked in Help?

TIA
Barbara