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

Surprised that no one suggested it:

System.DateTime.UtcNow.ToString("u").Replace(' ','T')

# Using PowerShell Core to demo

# Lowercase "u" format
[System.DateTime]::UtcNow.ToString("u")
> 2020-02-06 01:00:32Z

# Lowercase "u" format with replacement
[System.DateTime]::UtcNow.ToString("u").Replace(' ','T')
> 2020-02-06T01:00:32Z

The UniversalSortableDateTimePattern gets you almost all the way to what you want (which is more an RFC 3339 representation).

---

Added: I decided to use the benchmarks that were in answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/43793679/653058 to compare how this performs.

tl:dr; it's at the expensive end but still just a little over half a millisecond on my crappy old laptop :-)

Implementation:

[Benchmark]
public string ReplaceU()
{
   var text = dateTime.ToUniversalTime().ToString("u").Replace(' ', 'T');
   return text;
}

Results:

// * Summary *

BenchmarkDotNet=v0.11.5, OS=Windows 10.0.19002
Intel Xeon CPU E3-1245 v3 3.40GHz, 1 CPU, 8 logical and 4 physical cores
.NET Core SDK=3.0.100
  [Host]     : .NET Core 3.0.0 (CoreCLR 4.700.19.46205, CoreFX 4.700.19.46214), 64bit RyuJIT
  DefaultJob : .NET Core 3.0.0 (CoreCLR 4.700.19.46205, CoreFX 4.700.19.46214), 64bit RyuJIT


|               Method |     Mean |     Error |    StdDev |
|--------------------- |---------:|----------:|----------:|
|           CustomDev1 | 562.4 ns | 11.135 ns | 10.936 ns |
|           CustomDev2 | 525.3 ns |  3.322 ns |  3.107 ns |
|     CustomDev2WithMS | 609.9 ns |  9.427 ns |  8.356 ns |
|              FormatO | 356.6 ns |  6.008 ns |  5.620 ns |
|              FormatS | 589.3 ns |  7.012 ns |  6.216 ns |
|       FormatS_Verify | 599.8 ns | 12.054 ns | 11.275 ns |
|        CustomFormatK | 549.3 ns |  4.911 ns |  4.594 ns |
| CustomFormatK_Verify | 539.9 ns |  2.917 ns |  2.436 ns |
|             ReplaceU | 615.5 ns | 12.313 ns | 11.517 ns |

// * Hints *
Outliers
  BenchmarkDateTimeFormat.CustomDev2WithMS: Default     -> 1 outlier  was  removed (668.16 ns)
  BenchmarkDateTimeFormat.FormatS: Default              -> 1 outlier  was  removed (621.28 ns)
  BenchmarkDateTimeFormat.CustomFormatK: Default        -> 1 outlier  was  detected (542.55 ns)
  BenchmarkDateTimeFormat.CustomFormatK_Verify: Default -> 2 outliers were removed (557.07 ns, 560.95 ns)

// * Legends *
  Mean   : Arithmetic mean of all measurements
  Error  : Half of 99.9% confidence interval
  StdDev : Standard deviation of all measurements
  1 ns   : 1 Nanosecond (0.000000001 sec)

// ***** BenchmarkRunner: End *****