display time zone abbreviation

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Hi,

I am using .net framework 2.0 and i want to display time zone abbreviation eg. Arabian Standard Time as AST but my code below displays the full timezone name
Please help

<div style="float:right"><asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" ><%=DateTime.Now.ToLongDateString()+" "+DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString()+TimeZone.CurrentTimeZone.StandardName%></asp:Label></div>

Posted 28-Apr-11 13:33pm

Eager2Lern

Updated 28-Apr-11 15:59pm

walterhevedeich

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2011-04-28T15:37:00

First, using class System.TimeZoneInfo instead of System.TimeZone as it is recommended in the MSDN help page of the last one.

You current time zone is returned by System.TimeZoneInfo.Local; the names of the same time zone are returned by the properties DaylightName, DisplayName, Id and StandardName.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.timezoneinfo.aspx[^].

Which of the names represent the abbreviated form! No one! Same thing as with System.TimeZone. Why?

I think it is understandable. Look at the list of all abbreviated names of the time zones:
http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/[^].

Your can see that there is no one-to-one correspondence between abbreviations and time zones. More exactly, more than one time zone can be mapped onto the same abbreviated form; for example, "AMT" means UTC+4 (Armenia Time) and UTC-4 (Amazon Time) at the same time. Same thing with "EDT" and other abbreviations. On other words, abbreviated forms are useless for identification purposes, so their use should be best avoided as they can cause confusion. Even if you use abbreviated form of the name, it should be accompanied by UTC notation to avoid ambiguity.

It is known that .NET does not support abbreviated forms; I think — for a good reason.

There is an old W3C RFC822 standard http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc822/#z28[^] (1977) which described several abbreviations which cover only US; and this subset does not create ambiguity.

There are different discussion on various hacks which attempt to create the abbreviated name by automatic abbreviation of the standard names. I don't want to reference such codes; you can easily find them. Nothing can guarantee they match knows abbreviated names. One can use the table referenced above, list all time zones using System.TimeZoneInfo.GetSystemTimeZones, manually type abbreviated names, create a look-up table in the form of System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<System.TimeZoneInfo, string>; (not the other way around, due to ambiguity described above), populate it once and persist on the disk. During run-time, you can populate the dictionary from the file and use it to find abbreviated name by the "real" time zone. I would not recommend to waste time on it.

—SA

Rajesh Lagaria · Answer 2 · 2011-04-28T15:21:00

Unfortunately, there is no easy built-in way of doing this that I know of. However, you could put something together yourself. Here's an example:

C#

public static class zoneShort
    {
        public static string Convertion(this TimeZoneInfo Source)
        {
            var Map = new Dictionary<string, string>()
            {
            {"india standard time","ist"},
            {"eastern standard time","est"},
            {"mountain standard time","mst"},
            {"central standard time","cst"},
            {"pacific standard time","pst"}
            //etc...
            };
            return Map[Source.Id.ToLower()].ToUpper();
        }
    }

use as follows :

C#

string zoneAbbreviation = TimeZoneInfo.Local.Convertion();

display time zone abbreviation

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