Question

I’m trying to parse the following string to a DateTime:

“04-03-2008-16-18-08”

To simplify things I’ve written this unit test which always throws the exception “System.FormatException: String was not recognized as a valid DateTime.”

    [TestMethod]
    public void TemporaryDateTimeParseTest()
    {
        DateTime.ParseExact("04-03-2008-16-18-08", "dd-MM-yyyy-hh-mm-ss", null);
    }

The format should be day-month-year-hour-minute-second (as should be evident from above). It seems right according to the MSDN description to me. What am I missing?

I have seen people say ParseExact is awkward, if this is the wrong method to use how can I use the regular Parse method to pick up this format?

Answer 1

You need to use HH for a 24-hour clock instead of hh for 12-hour clock.

MSDN Custom Date and Time Format Strings