Question

I am receiving data representing a time slot from a service as a string in the form of:

1500-1600

This meaning 3pm to 4pm.

I will have a list of these e.g.

1200-1300

1300-1400

1400-1500

and I have to represent this in the UI as

12pm – 1pm

1pm – 2pm

2pm – 3pm

Unfortunately this list could be in a random order.

My question is is there any way of using the DateTime object to be able to convert a 24 hour time to a 12 hour time and also is there a way of ordering times in order?

At the moment I am feeling I will have to write a custom parsing function but wondering if anyone knows how to do this better? or could advise on how they would achieve this.

Answer 1

If you have the four digit strings (1200, 1300) and it will always be four digits (e.g. 9 am is 0900) then you can call the static ParseExact method on the DateTime structure like so:

DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact(time, 'HHmm', formatInfo); 

formatInfo is an IFormatProvider interface implementation.

If you have a three digit string, then you can use this:

DateTime dt = DateTime.ParseExact(time, 'Hmm', formatInfo); 

However, I would recommend using a four-digit string because of the ambiguity presented with a time like ‘121’.

From there, if you want to output am/pm, etc, etc, you would just call the ToString method, passing the following format:

string ampm = dt.ToString('htt');