[Solved] Format DateTime without converting it to a string in c#? [closed]

Question

I think there is a bit of a confusion here what the string concatenation does to your values.

It is nothing less than simply using the default format for a parameterless ToString()!

Each of your strings like

Debug.Log("currentTime: " + currentTime);

basically internally implicitly equal

Debug.Log("currentTime: " + currentTime.ToString());

In that case the ToString() without parameters can be omitted since c# already uses it implicitly.

=> You are using string in all your examples! How else do you think anything is logged (as a string!) to the console? 😉

As noted in the comments a DataTime is just a point in time and basically just a kind of wrapper around a long which are the system ticks passed since the Unix Epoch.

All the other properties, values and formats are calculated based on those ticks on demand (which makes it quite expensive btw).

Is there a way to get “DateTime.Now” formatted as “dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss”

Yes, exactly how you did it.

So what you want to do is just use DateTime for all your calculations and AddMinutes etc. and then only when you need to display the (current) value you simply pass in the correct format just like you did in your first line

const string format = "dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss";

and

Debug.Log("currentTime: " + currentTime.ToString(format));

Update

Now finally knowing your actual code and issue

There is no reason to use parse here … what you want is

TimeSpan totalTime = DateTime.Now - lastTime;

and then Debug.Log(totalTime.ToString(YOUR_DESIRED_FORMAT));

Accepted Answer