Question

I’m trying out the DateTime.TryParseExact method, and I have come over a case that I just don’t get. I have some formats and some subjects to parse that each should match one of the formats perfectly:

var formats = new[]
     {
         "%H",
         "HH",
         "Hmm",
         "HHmm",
         "Hmmss",
         "HHmmss",
     };

var subjects = new[]
     {
         "1",
         "12",
         "123",
         "1234",
         "12345",
         "123456",
     };

I then try to parse them all and print out the results:

foreach(var subject in subjects)
{
    DateTime result;
    DateTime.TryParseExact(subject, formats, 
        CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, 
        DateTimeStyles.NoCurrentDateDefault,
        out result);

    Console.WriteLine("{0,-6} : {1}", 
        subject,
        result.ToString("T", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));
}

I get the following:

1      : 01:00:00
12     : 12:00:00
123    : 00:00:00
1234   : 12:34:00
12345  : 00:00:00
123456 : 12:34:56

And to my question… why is it failing on 123 and 12345? Shouldn’t those have become 01:23:00 and 01:23:45? What am I missing here? And how can I get it to work as I would expect it to?

---

Update: So, seems like we might have figured out why this is failing sort of. Seems like the H is actually grabbing two digits and then leaving just one for the mm, which would then fail. But, does anyone have a good idea on how I can change this code so that I would get the result I am looking for?

Another update: Think I’ve found a reasonable solution now. Added it as an answer. Will accept it in 2 days unless someone else come up with an even better one. Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Ok, so I think I have figured this all out now thanks to more reading, experimenting and the other helpful answers here. What’s happening is that H, m and s actually grabs two digits when they can, even if there won’t be enough digits for the rest of the format. So for example with the format Hmm and the digits 123, H would grab 12 and there would only be a 3 left. And mm requires two digits, so it fails. Tadaa.

So, my solution is currently to instead use just the following three formats:

var formats = new[]
    {
        "%H",
        "Hm",
        "Hms",
    };

With the rest of the code from my question staying the same, I will then get this as a result:

1      : 01:00:00
12     : 12:00:00
123    : 12:03:00
1234   : 12:34:00
12345  : 12:34:05
123456 : 12:34:56

Which I think should be both reasonable and acceptable 🙂