Getting a Fail Trying to Parse a ZonedDateTime from a String Using ZonedDateTimePattern - nodatime

Question

I've been learning how to use NodaTime, as I think it is a far superior "all things temporal" library that the handful of structs in the BCL. Reading the docs and experimenting.
This experiment has me flummoxed. I started out just trying to parse a ZonedDateTime.
The things I was trying were not successful, so I thought I'd try something which should be "bulletproof". The following code represents that attempt:
Instant thisNow = SystemClock.Instance.GetCurrentInstant();
var timezone = DateTimeZoneProviders.Tzdb["Australia/Brisbane"];
var zonedDateTime = thisNow.InZone(timezone);
var zonePattern = ZonedDateTimePattern.GeneralFormatOnlyIso;
var zoneFormatted = zonePattern.Format(zonedDateTime);
var zoneParseResult = zonePattern.Parse(zoneFormatted);
Console.WriteLine(zoneParseResult.Success ? "parse success" : "parse failure");
So, simply trying to parse back that which you just converted to a string.
The zoneFormatted has the following value 2021-09-04T16:59:08 Australia/Brisbane (+10)
Any ideas what I am doing wrong?
Cheers

Answer 1

Any ideas what I am doing wrong?
You're using ZonedDateTimePattern.GeneralFormatOnlyIso, which is (as the name suggests) only for formatting, not for parsing.
To get a pattern which is able to parse time zones, you need to specify an IDateTimeZoneProvider. The easiest way to do that is to start with a format-only pattern, and use WithZoneProvider:
using NodaTime;
using NodaTime.Text;
using System;
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var pattern = ZonedDateTimePattern.GeneralFormatOnlyIso
.WithZoneProvider(DateTimeZoneProviders.Tzdb);
var text = "2021-09-04T16:59:08 Australia/Brisbane (+10)";
var result = pattern.Parse(text);
Console.WriteLine(result.Success);
Console.WriteLine(result.Value);
}
}