Displaying AM/PM In Lower Case In C# & .NET

When displaying the time, you have two options:

1. 24 hour clock
2. 12 hour clock

To display the time using the 24 Hour clock, you would do it like this:

var now = DateTime.Now;

Console.WriteLine(now.ToString("HH:mm"));

This will print the following:

To display the time using the 12-hour clock, we would do it like this:

var now = DateTime.Now;

Console.WriteLine(now.ToString("hh:mm tt"));

This will print the following:

The format string for the AM/PM designator is tt, which you can read about here.

Recently, a client requested the time to be formatted like this - 06:24 pm

Note here that the pm is in lower case.

I wondered whether there was a way to modify the format string to output this.

There isn’t.

The quick and dirty way is to lower case the entire string.

var now = DateTime.Now;

Console.WriteLine(now.ToString("hh:mm tt").ToLower());

This outputs what we would expect:

Is there a more robust way of doing this? Of course. We shall look at that in our next post.

TLDR

To quickly output am/pm in lowercase, change the entire time as a string to lowercase.

Happy hacking!