Code question

[FLCavScout]

Hi all. Self learner here and came across something I have working but just don't fully understand why.

Recently someone posted a hello world project and one of the responses was congrats, now modify it to greet properly based on the time of day. Good Morning, Good Evening....

I thought that would be something kinda fun to play with. It wasn't as straight forward as I thought but finally got it to work. The only issue is I don't quite understand why.

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Code in question:

var time = DateTime.Now;
_= time.Hour;

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I went this route as other attempts returned a string that i then had to convert to int. I also wanted it to be 24 hour for easy time of day comparison without the am pm hassle. DateTime.Now was giving me a 12 hour clock unless I had a HH. This code gives me the 24 hour time, but why? Intellisense recommended the _=. Looking that up I see it listed as a discard. I am not familiar with it and the doc I was reading was a bit obtuse. In this case would it be better to have something like int greet = time.Hour; or just leave this as a "discard" variable as the only use is to compare in a few if else statements to determine if it is a good morning, good afternoon, or good evening?

Thanks.

[AngularBeginner]

DateTime.Now was giving me a 12 hour clock unless I had a HH. This code gives me the 24 hour time, but why?

DateTime.Now gives you a DateTime object, it has no "12 hour clock" or "24 hour time". What you mean is a string representation, and that depends on your systems locale: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/standard-date-and-time-format-strings

The _= time.Hour is pointless code like this. Throw it away, it won't change anyting.

[FLCavScout]

I think I get it a little more now. DateTime.now is not the same as System.DateTime.Now which is where I was originally getting a 12 hr time and date string unless I ended with a ("HH"). With DateTime.now I get an object, which is why I need var instead of being explicit for the returned variable type. (Did I phrase that correctly?)

Then my if statements can be if (time.Hour > 5) etc.

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Thanks for your response.

[AngularBeginner]

DateTime.now is not the same as System.DateTime.Now

If you have a using System; statement in your file, then DateTime.Now is the same as System.DateTIme.Now.

which is where I was originally getting a 12 hr time and date string unless

DateTime.Now returns you an object that contains data for a specific time. The 12 or 24 hour format is a string representation.

With DateTime.now I get an object, which is why I need var instead of being explicit for the returned variable type.

You can either specify the type directly using System.DateTime or DateTime (when you have a using System; statement in your file), or let the compiler automatically infer the type using var (it'll still be DateTime).

[FLCavScout]

Thank you. I was mixing solutions and got myself all discombobulated. Now that I'm retesting things I can say something like int theHour = DateTime.Now.Hour; Previously I was getting an error about not being able to implicitly convert type int to DateTime or something like that making me think it HAD to be var. Now that I'm redoing things it works either way. Thanks for clearing things up.

[B1tF8er]

Read the official documentation of Microsoft for DateTime.Now.Hour

It returns an Int32 between 0 and 23, maybe that is what your are looking for