Issue 216 in noda-time: ZonedDateTime formatting and support for time zone abbreviations

[noda...@googlecode.com]

Status: New
Owner: ----

New issue 216 by germanft...@gmail.com: ZonedDateTime formatting and
support for time zone abbreviations
http://code.google.com/p/noda-time/issues/detail?id=216

Hi!

I would like to display ZonedDateTime to the user with some kind of
formatting and info of the timezone.

Currently calling ToString() on a ZonedDateTime yields something like this
(es-ES Culture) in Madrid.

Local: 25/04/2013 11:50 Offset: +02 Zone: Europe/Paris

It would be nice to:

1) Give ZonedDateTime better ToString support as other Noda types have
2) Support standard/daylight/summer abbreviations in the
formatting. (I think this info is in the tz database sources, but NodaTime
currently doesnt seem to use it)
3) Make reasonably formatting defaults for a ZonedDateTime including the
systems culture (for example show CET in culture "es-ES" but MEZ if
culture "de-DE")

Formatting examples:
25/04/2013 11:50 CEST
25/04/2013 11:50 MESZ
25/04/2013 11:50 CEST (UTC+2)
25/04/2013 11:50 UTC+02

I suppose this is a very low priority item, as the user generally does not
care about their timezone abbreviation, but it may be useful to give
feedback to the user that this is ZonedDateTime according to a time zone,
specially when you want to display a ZonedDateTime that originates in a
different timezone that the one the user is on.

I think that the OffsetDateTime formatting can also be improved.

Germán



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Updates:
Labels: Type-Enhancement

Comment #1 on issue 216 by jonathan.skeet: ZonedDateTime formatting and

support for time zone abbreviations
http://code.google.com/p/noda-time/issues/detail?id=216

Full ZonedDateTime pattern support is on the roadmap for 1.2 (and present
in source control in ZonedDateTimePattern and indeed
OffsetDateTimePattern). However, I have no current goal of supporting
abbreviations. They're misleading, poorly understood, and often ambiguous.
(Think about what the *parsing* side would need to work out). Having
different abbreviations for the same time zone in different cultures makes
the whole thing even messier.

It's possible that we'll address this at some point, but I'd rather not do
it at all than do it poorly - and at the moment it's not clear how we'd do
it well.

Note that when we start using CLDR data in 1.3, we should start being able
to present a more "location-oriented" view of time zones, and one which
uses different cultures appropriately. That's still very much TBD at the
moment though.

[noda...@googlecode.com]

Comment #2 on issue 216 by jonathan.skeet: ZonedDateTime formatting and

support for time zone abbreviations
http://code.google.com/p/noda-time/issues/detail?id=216

Format-only support is included in revision 4bb395aca17c.

I'm still not 100% sure we want this at all, and if we do have it we *may*
want to make it parseable (although that would probably be extremely slow,
and lead to ambiguities).

[noda...@googlecode.com]

Updates:
Status: Fixed

Comment #3 on issue 216 by jonathan.skeet: ZonedDateTime formatting and

support for time zone abbreviations
http://code.google.com/p/noda-time/issues/detail?id=216

Marking this as fixed for now, with abbreviations being format-only.