Parsing ISO 8601 with timezone to .NET datetime

Question

I have an ISO 8601 timestamp in the format:

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss[.nnnnnnn][{+|-}hh:mm]

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss[{+|-}hh:mm]

Examples:

2013-07-03T02:16:03.000+01:00

2013-07-03T02:16:03+01:00

How can I parse it to a .NET Framework DateTime with correct TimeZone supplied?

The DateTime.TryParse doesn't work because the trailing info regarding the TimeZone.

Answer 1

You should be able to format it using DateTimeOffset and the K custom format specifier. You can then convert that to a DateTime afterwards if you want to. Sample code:

using System;
using System.Globalization;

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        string text = "2013-07-03T02:16:03.000+01:00";
        string pattern = "yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.FFFK";
        DateTimeOffset dto = DateTimeOffset.ParseExact
            (text, pattern, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
        Console.WriteLine(dto);
    }
}

One thing to note is that this is badly named - it's not actually a time zone, it's just a UTC offset. It doesn't actually tell you the original time zone. (There can be several different time zones observing the same offset at the same time.)

Or with Noda Time (unstable version, which will become 1.2 pretty soon):

string text = "2013-07-03T02:16:03.000+01:00";
OffsetDateTimePattern pattern = OffsetDateTimePattern.ExtendedIsoPattern;
OffsetDateTime odt = pattern.Parse(text).Value; 
Console.WriteLine(odt);