Parse string to TimeSpan

Question

I have some strings of xxh:yym format where xx is hours and yy is minutes like \"05h:30m\". What is an elegant way to convert a string of this type to TimeSpan?

Answer 1

DateTime.ParseExact or DateTime.TryParseExact lets you specify the exact format of the input. After you get the DateTime, you can grab the DateTime.TimeOfDay which is a TimeSpan.

In the absence of TimeSpan.TryParseExact, I think an 'elegant' solution is out of the mix.

@buyutec As you suspected, this method would not work if the time spans have more than 24 hours.

Answer 2

From another thread:

How to convert xs:duration to timespan

Answer 3

This seems to work, though it is a bit hackish:

TimeSpan span;


if (TimeSpan.TryParse("05h:30m".Replace("m","").Replace("h",""), out span))
            MessageBox.Show(span.ToString());

Answer 4

Here'e one possibility:

TimeSpan.Parse(s.Remove(2, 1).Remove(5, 1));

And if you want to make it more elegant in your code, use an extension method:

public static TimeSpan ToTimeSpan(this string s)
{
  TimeSpan t = TimeSpan.Parse(s.Remove(2, 1).Remove(5, 1));
  return t;
}

Then you can do

"05h:30m".ToTimeSpan();

Answer 5

Are TimeSpan.Parse and TimeSpan.TryParse not options? If you aren't using an "approved" format, you'll need to do the parsing manually. I'd probably capture your two integer values in a regular expression, and then try to parse them into integers, from there you can create a new TimeSpan with its constructor.