C# – How to change time in DateTime

cdatetimetime

How can I change only the time in my DateTime variable "s"?

DateTime s = some datetime;

Best Answer

You can't change a DateTime value - it's immutable. However, you can change the variable to have a new value. The easiest way of doing that to change just the time is to create a TimeSpan with the relevant time, and use the DateTime.Date property:

DateTime s = ...;
TimeSpan ts = new TimeSpan(10, 30, 0);
s = s.Date + ts;

s will now be the same date, but at 10.30am.

Note that DateTime disregards daylight saving time transitions, representing "naive" Gregorian time in both directions (see Remarks section in the DateTime docs). The only exceptions are .Now and .Today: they retrieve current system time which reflects these events as they occur.

This is the kind of thing which motivated me to start the Noda Time project, which is now production-ready. Its ZonedDateTime type is made "aware" by linking it to a tz database entry.

Related Solutions

C# – How to calculate someone’s age based on a DateTime type birthday

An easy to understand and simple solution.

// Save today's date.
var today = DateTime.Today;

// Calculate the age.
var age = today.Year - birthdate.Year;

// Go back to the year in which the person was born in case of a leap year
if (birthdate.Date > today.AddYears(-age)) age--;

However, this assumes you are looking for the western idea of the age and not using East Asian reckoning.

C# – Calculate relative time in C#

Jeff, your code is nice but could be clearer with constants (as suggested in Code Complete).

const int SECOND = 1;
const int MINUTE = 60 * SECOND;
const int HOUR = 60 * MINUTE;
const int DAY = 24 * HOUR;
const int MONTH = 30 * DAY;

var ts = new TimeSpan(DateTime.UtcNow.Ticks - yourDate.Ticks);
double delta = Math.Abs(ts.TotalSeconds);

if (delta < 1 * MINUTE)
  return ts.Seconds == 1 ? "one second ago" : ts.Seconds + " seconds ago";

if (delta < 2 * MINUTE)
  return "a minute ago";

if (delta < 45 * MINUTE)
  return ts.Minutes + " minutes ago";

if (delta < 90 * MINUTE)
  return "an hour ago";

if (delta < 24 * HOUR)
  return ts.Hours + " hours ago";

if (delta < 48 * HOUR)
  return "yesterday";

if (delta < 30 * DAY)
  return ts.Days + " days ago";

if (delta < 12 * MONTH)
{
  int months = Convert.ToInt32(Math.Floor((double)ts.Days / 30));
  return months <= 1 ? "one month ago" : months + " months ago";
}
else
{
  int years = Convert.ToInt32(Math.Floor((double)ts.Days / 365));
  return years <= 1 ? "one year ago" : years + " years ago";
}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C# – How to calculate someone’s age based on a DateTime type birthday

C# – Calculate relative time in C#

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