• Introduction
• Overview
• Why does Noda Time exist?
• Installation
• Core
• Core concepts
• Choosing (and converting) between types
• Core types quick reference
• Design philosophy and conventions
• Text
• Text handling
• Patterns for Duration values
• Patterns for Offset values
• Patterns for Instant values
• Patterns for LocalTime values
• Patterns for LocalDate values
• Patterns for LocalDateTime values
• Patterns for OffsetDateTime values
• Patterns for ZonedDateTime values
• Patterns for Period values
• Advanced
• Date and time arithmetic
• BCL conversions
• Serialization
• Threading
• Library
• Unit testing with Noda Time
• Updating the time zone database
• Mono support
• Limitations of Noda Time
• Current roadmap
• Version history

Patterns for Instant values

The Instant type supports the following patterns:

Standard Patterns

The following standard patterns are supported:

• g: General format pattern. The ISO-8601 representation of this instant in UTC, using the pattern "yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss'Z'" and always using the invariant culture, with the default "start of time" and "end of time" labels. This is the default format pattern.
• n: Numeric with thousand separators. This gives the number of ticks since the Unix epoch as an integer, including thousands separators. Sample on September 16th 2011: "13,161,548,674,473,131"
• d: Numeric without thousand separators. This gives the number of ticks since the Unix epoch as an integer, not including thousands separators. Sample on September 16th 2011: "13161548674473131"

Custom Patterns

Instant supports all the LocalDateTime custom patterns. The pattern allows the culture to be specified, but always uses the ISO-8601 calendar, and always uses the UTC time zone. The "template value" is always the Unix epoch.

All instant patterns (other than the standard numeric ones) handle Instant.MinValue and Instant.MaxValue separately. The default formatting of the values are simply "MinInstant" and "MaxInstant" respectively, but a new InstantPattern with different min/max labels can be created using the WithMinMaxLabels method. The labels must be non-empty strings which differ from each other.