DateTime

Articles about working with dates, times, and time zones in C#, primarily using the DateTime class.

C# – Convert DateTime to string

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When you want to convert a DateTime to a string, use ToString(). By default, this converts the DateTime to a string using the current culture’s date/time format (from the OS). In most cases, you’ll want to specify the format to use. You can do this by passing in a format string consisting of format specifier … Read more

C# – TimeZoneInfo with current UTC offset

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TimeZoneInfo always shows the base UTC offset. This can be confusing because the UTC offset can change based on the date (due to daylight savings rules). Here’s an example showing DateTimeOffset and TimeZoneInfo with different offsets: You can get a date’s UTC offset from DateTimeOffset and combine it with TimeZoneInfo.DisplayName. This approach is implemented in … Read more

C# – How to use TimeZoneInfo

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Time zones are complicated and their rules can change, so it makes sense to use a library when you’re dealing with them. One option in .NET is to use the built-in TimeZoneInfo class. Here’s an example of using TimeZoneInfo to get the local system’s time zone: This outputs: Note: The display name always show the … Read more

C# – Get the current date and time

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Here’s an example of how to get the current date/time: This outputs the current local date/time: Note: By default, it uses the current culture’s format (from the OS). This is showing the US date format – MM/dd/yyyy. DateTime.Now is the local date/time from the system where the code is executing. Keep that in mind if … Read more

C# – Get the last day of the month

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The last day of the month is the number of days in that month. To get the number of days in a month, use DateTime.DaysInMonth(year, month): This outputs the following: Notice that it handles leap years (2024) appropriately. Using the number of days in the month, you can get the last day of the month: … Read more

C# – Parsing a DateTime from a string

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You can convert a string to a DateTime (parse) with one of these methods: I’ll show examples of using both methods for parsing various DateTime formats. Using DateTime.Parse() DateTime.Parse() can handle parsing a wide variety of culture-specific standard DateTime formats and the ISO-8601 format (which is the default date format for JSON serialization). By default, … Read more

C# – How to test that your code can handle another culture’s date format

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Let’s say you’re using DateTime.Parse() to convert a date string into a DateTime object. By default, DateTime.Parse() uses CultureInfo.CurrentCulture to figure out the date format. The current culture ultimately comes from your OS settings. So when you run this code on a computer that is using the en-US locale, the current culture will automatically default … Read more