Parse DateTime with timezone of form PST/CEST/UTC/etc

Question

I'm trying to parse an international datetime string similar to:

24-okt-08 21:09:06 CEST

So far I've got something like:

CultureInfo culture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture("nl-BE");
DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact("24-okt-08 21:09:06 CEST",
    "dd-MMM-yy HH:mm:ss ...", culture);

The problem is what should I use for the '...' in the format string? Looking at the Custom Date and Time Format String MSDN page doesn't seem to list a format string for parsing timezones in PST/CEST/GMT/UTC form.

Answer 1

AFAIK the time zone abbreviations are not recognized. However if you replace the abbreviation with the time zone offset, it will be OK. E.g.:

DateTime dt1 = DateTime.ParseExact("24-okt-08 21:09:06 CEST".Replace("CEST", "+2"), "dd-MMM-yy HH:mm:ss z", culture);
DateTime dt2 = DateTime.ParseExact("24-okt-08 21:09:06 CEST".Replace("CEST", "+02"), "dd-MMM-yy HH:mm:ss zz", culture);
DateTime dt3 = DateTime.ParseExact("24-okt-08 21:09:06 CEST".Replace("CEST", "+02:00"), "dd-MMM-yy HH:mm:ss zzz", culture);

Answer 2

I have two answers because I'm not exactly sure what you are asking.

1) I see you are using CultureInfo, so if you just want to format the date and time to be culture specific, I would separate the date/time and timezone, apply culture method on the date/time and append the timezone. If "CEST" is different for different cultures, you will have to change it by listing all the options (maybe in a case statement).

2) If you want date/time to be converted to another timezone, you can't use CultureInfo,

I suggest reading: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973825.aspx

You can also use the .net framework 3.5 class TimeZoneInfo (different from TimeZone) to make your life easier.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timezoneinfo.aspx

Answer 3

TimeZone abbreviated name codes are not supported in .NET unfortunately. I have been having a good look at the java code which DOES support RFC822 date formats (see the java.text.SimpleDateFormat class) and thinking about porting it to .NET. However ive realised i dont have enough hours in the day ot make this a reality so i hope it gets added to the .NET framework at some point since they have 90% of the functionality already in there, just lacking the codes.

Harrison you are wrong the codes are non localised - only the timezone descriptions are localised which means that in the end ill probably just write a simple wrapper function that converts known timezone codes to equivalent UTC offsets as outlined above.