How to get correct timestamp in C#

c# timestamp
Wojciech Ketrzynski picture Wojciech Ketrzynski · Jan 19, 2014 · Viewed 372.4k times · Source

I would like to get valid timestamp in my application so I wrote:

public static String GetTimestamp(DateTime value)
{
    return value.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmssffff");
}
//  ...later on in the code
String timeStamp = GetTimestamp(new DateTime());
Console.WriteLine(timeStamp);

output:

000101010000000000

I wanted something like:

20140112180244

What have I done wrong?

Answer

ekad picture ekad · Jan 19, 2014

Your mistake is using new DateTime(), which returns January 1, 0001 at 00:00:00.000 instead of current date and time. The correct syntax to get current date and time is DateTime.Now, so change this:

String timeStamp = GetTimestamp(new DateTime());

to this:

String timeStamp = GetTimestamp(DateTime.Now);

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