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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T09:36:56+00:00

I’m trying to retrieve a timespan from a string, but TryParseExact is returning false

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I’m trying to retrieve a timespan from a string, but TryParseExact is returning false (fail).

I can’t see what I’m doing wrong, can you help? I’ve tried 2 versions of my line in the code, both do not work.

TimeSpan.TryParseExact("04:00:01","HH:mm:ss",CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, out aTime)

and

TimeSpan.TryParseExact("04:00:01","HH:mm:ss", null, out aTime)

EDIT:
both responses here are correct, I have the wrong format for my custom timespan format – the mistake I made is to assume that the custom formats for DateTime would work for TimeSpans, but they do not.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The problem is simply in the format string for the TimeSpan, you have specified "HH:mm:ss". The specifier HH (upper case) is not valid for timespan. You should use hh. Format strings are indeed case sensitive.

    The colon character (:) also needs to be escaped, so use "hh\\:mm\\:ss", @"hh\:mm\:ss" or "hh':'mm':'ss". All three forms will have the same effect.

    You can review a list of valid custom format strings for TimeSpan here. and the standard format strings for TimeSpan are here.

    While HH is valid for DateTime and DateTimeOffset where it represents the 24 hour clock and lower case hh represents a 12 hour clock, For TimeSpan – the hours component is always based on 24 hours. You would think that the HH format would be the one chosen, for uniformity, but nope – it’s hh.

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