Parse DateTime with time zone 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);