Question

I am using the TimeSpan.ParseExact method to parse a time span. However, why does the following fail and throw an exception?

string time = "23:10:00";
string format = "HH:mm:ss";
TimeSpan timeSpan = TimeSpan.ParseExact(time, format, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

Judging from the Custom Date and Time Format Strings article on MSDN, the format is correct for this input string. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You linked to the custom DateTime format specifiers – but you’re not parsing to DateTime, you’re parsing to TimeSpan, so you need the custom TimeSpan format specifiers – which means using “hh” instead of “HH”. Additionally, as per the documentation, you need to escape the colons – so you really want:

string format = @"hh\:mm\:ss";

I’ve validated that this works with your sample value.