Timezone Abbreviations

Question

TimeZoneInfo does not provide abbreviation or a short name for a given Timezone. The only good way to do it is to have a dictionary that will map abbreviations

Answer 1

I store all my dates in UTC and often have to display them in local time, so I created an extension method ToAbbreviation()

    public static string ToAbbreviation(this TimeZone theTimeZone)
    {

        string timeZoneString = theTimeZone.StandardName;
        string result = string.Concat(System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex
           .Matches(timeZoneString, "[A-Z]")
           .OfType()
           .Select(match => match.Value));

        return result;
    }

example usage:

string tz = TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.ToAbbreviation();
string formattedDate = String.Format("{0:yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm:ss} {1}", myDate, tz);

Or, if you want to just get a formatted date string from a DateTime object:

public static string ToLocalTimeWithTimeZoneAbbreviation(this DateTime dt)
{
    DateTime localtime = dt.ToLocalTime();
    string tz = TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.ToAbbreviation();

    string formattedDate = String.Format("{0:yyyy/MM/dd hh:mm:ss} {1}", localtime, tz);
    return formattedDate;
}

and use as follows:

string formattedDate = myDateTimeObject.ToLocalTimeWithTimeZoneAbbreviation()

output: 2019-06-24 02:26:31 EST