How to format the HH:mm:ss separators of a TimeSpan in a culture-aware manner?

Question

I\'m working on an app that may be seen in many countries in the world. There are not many countries that show hours, minutes and seconds with something other than : as a s

Answer 1

This is more like a comment, but needs some space, so I write it as an answer.

While string formatting of DateTime has been in .NET for a very long time, formatting of TimeSpan was new in .NET 4.0 (Visual Studio 2010).

A culture has a DateTimeFormatInfo object which is used by DateTime and includes info on whether to use colon : or period . or something else between hours, minutes and seconds. Now, TimeSpan does not seem to use this DateTimeFormatInfo object, and there is nothing called "TimeSpanFormatInfo".

Here's an example:

// we start from a non-read-only invariant culture
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("");

// change time separator of DateTime format info of the culture
CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.TimeSeparator = "<-->";

var dt = new DateTime(2013, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15);
Console.WriteLine(dt);  // writes "07/08/2013 13<-->14<-->15"

var ts = new TimeSpan(13, 14, 15);
Console.WriteLine(ts);  // writes "13:14:15"