Recently I’ve had a number of reasons to use Date and Time formatting. Usually, a few educated guesses and you’ve found what you needed. Except when you educated guess don’t get you want you expected and you do a bit of research.
For example to get a Hours, Minutes and Seconds for like 12:10:23 you could use the string HH:mm:ss. Not so fast! Did you really want military time (e.g. the 24 hour clock like 20:12:15)? The capital HH gets you the 24 hour clock.
If you want the more standard 12 clock with AM and PM you’d need. hh:mm:ss. Additionally, you’d need the tt. What is tt? It the AM, PM designator.
You want milliseconds its fff.
But wait there is bit more. There are standard and custom date/time formatting strings and some the character overlap, which explains an occasional unexpected results.
My research turned up some useful reference information.
standard date/time formatting strings (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az4se3k1.aspx).
For example the following get the current date. Well for me its US local depending on your part the world it may differ.
string s = DateTime.Now.ToString(“d"); // produces current date like 8/8/2013
Custom date/time formatting strings (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4.aspx).
For example to get the current time in the AM/PM 12 hour format use.
string s = DateTime.Now.ToString(“d"); // produces current time like 10:37:42 AM