Return Values for the CStr Function (Visual Basic)

The following table describes the return values for CStr for different data types of expression.

If expression type is CStr returns
Boolean Data Type A string containing "True" or "False".
Date Data Type A string containing a Date value (date and time) in the short date format of your system.
Numeric Data Types A string representing the number.

CStr and Date

The Date type always contains both date and time information. For purposes of type conversion, Visual Basic considers 1/1/0001 (January 1 of the year 1) to be a neutral value for the date, and 00:00:00 (midnight) to be a neutral value for the time. CStr does not include neutral values in the resulting string. For example, if you convert #January 1, 0001 9:30:00# to a string, the result is "9:30:00 AM"; the date information is suppressed. However, the date information is still present in the original Date value and can be recovered with functions such as DatePart.

Note

The CStr function performs its conversion based on the current culture settings for the application. To get the string representation of a number in a particular culture, use the number's ToString(IFormatProvider) method. For example, use Double.ToString when converting a value of type Double to a String.