Feature: convert PhpDateTime into native System.Datetime object

[sommmen]

Perhaps a cool feature would be to allow for Php datetime objects to be directly translated to native System.DateTime.

I don't need this myself but it should be easy enough to implement - i have this code-snippet that does the job halfway already which we can use - so just posting this as a nice to have backlog item ^^.

private static DateTime? ParsePhpDateTimeStringSafe(string dateString, string timezone, long timezoneType)
{
    try
    {
        return ParsePhpDateTimeString(dateString, timezone, timezoneType);
    }
    catch
    {
        // We're swallowing exceptions because we'll be handling null values instead.
        return null;
    }
}

private static DateTime ParsePhpDateTimeString(string dateString, string timezone, long timezoneType)
{
    var localDateTimePattern = LocalDateTimePattern.CreateWithInvariantCulture("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss.ffffff");
    var localDateTime = localDateTimePattern.Parse(dateString).GetValueOrThrow();

    // See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/17711005/4122889
    //  Type 1; A UTC offset, such as in new DateTime("17 July 2013 -0300");
    //  Type 2; A timezone abbreviation, such as in new DateTime("17 July 2013 GMT");
    //  Type 3: A timezone identifier, such as in new DateTime("17 July 2013", new DateTimeZone("Europe/London"));

    switch (timezoneType)
    {
        case 1:
            var offSetPattern = OffsetPattern.CreateWithInvariantCulture("+HH:mm");
            var offset = offSetPattern.Parse(timezone).Value;
            var zonedDateTimeFromOffset = localDateTime.InZoneStrictly(DateTimeZone.ForOffset(offset));
            return zonedDateTimeFromOffset.ToDateTimeUtc();
        case 2:
            throw new NotSupportedException("Not (Yet) support converting from timeZonetype 2 - but doable to add in!");
        case 3:
            var dateTimeZone = DateTimeZoneProviders.Tzdb[timezone];
            var zonedDateTime = dateTimeZone.AtStrictly(localDateTime);
            var dateTimeUtc = zonedDateTime.ToDateTimeUtc();
            return dateTimeUtc;
        default:
            throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException(nameof(timezoneType));
    }


}

This does however use the NodaTime package which may not be a dependency we'd like. Optionally we could move this to a seperate package to give consumers more control over this.

We may also be able to get the code working without NodaTime, perhaps with something like https://github.com/mattjohnsonpint/TimeZoneNames for the timezonedb values but i have not given this much thought.

[StringEpsilon]

Hi,

that sounds like it'd be useful, but I'm afraid it's way beyond the scope of this library. I am leaving the issue open for now, because I might add a second package to this repository for that purpose. Not sure if I'd want to maintain that yet.