How to change time in DateTime?

Santhosh picture Santhosh · Dec 7, 2009 · Viewed 425.4k times · Source

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

DateTime s = some datetime;

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Dec 7, 2009

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.