Given a DateTime object, how do I get an ISO 8601 date in string format?

Question

Given:

DateTime.UtcNow

How do I get a string which represents the same value in an ISO 8601-compliant format?

Note that ISO 8601 de

Answer 1

As mentioned in other answer, DateTime has issues by design.

NodaTime

I suggest to use NodaTime to manage date/time values:

• Local time, date, datetime
• Global time
• Time with timezone
• Period
• Duration

Formatting

So, to create and format ZonedDateTime you can use the following code snippet:

var instant1 = Instant.FromUtc(2020, 06, 29, 10, 15, 22);

var utcZonedDateTime = new ZonedDateTime(instant1, DateTimeZone.Utc);
utcZonedDateTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss'Z'", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
// 2020-06-29T10:15:22Z


var instant2 = Instant.FromDateTimeUtc(new DateTime(2020, 06, 29, 10, 15, 22, DateTimeKind.Utc));

var amsterdamZonedDateTime = new ZonedDateTime(instant2, DateTimeZoneProviders.Tzdb["Europe/Amsterdam"]);
amsterdamZonedDateTime.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss'Z'", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
// 2020-06-29T12:15:22Z

For me NodaTime code looks quite verbose. But types are really useful. They help to handle date/time values correctly.

Newtonsoft.Json

To use NodaTime with Newtonsoft.Json you need to add reference to NodaTime.Serialization.JsonNet NuGet package and configure JSON options.

services
    .AddMvc()
    .AddJsonOptions(options =>
    {
        var settings=options.SerializerSettings;
        settings.DateParseHandling = DateParseHandling.None;
        settings.ConfigureForNodaTime(DateTimeZoneProviders.Tzdb);
    });