How to convert from a INT value HHMMSS to TimeSpan using PowerShell - powershell

Question

I'm creating an application in PowerShell to reschedule the existing jobs in a SQL Server instance. So I have to get the active_start_time value from the sysschules table. The time value is formatted as INT HHMMSS on a 24-hour clock.
As I am using the JobSchedule class (Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Agent.JobSchedule) in my PowerShell application, I need to convert from time value in INT to a TimeSpan value in order add to ActiveStartTimeOfDay property.
Example:
Original data: [INT] active_start_time = 10500
Expected data: [TimeSpan] ActiveStartTimeOfDay = 01h 05 min 00s

Answer 1

As FoxDeploy points out, treat the input number as a string!
First, you'll want to use String.PadLeft() to zero-pad the number:
$active_start_time = 10500
$start_timestamp = "$active_start_time".PadLeft(6, '0') # "010500"
Now that we have a "timestamp" of sorts, [timespan] has a ParseExact() method we can use to parse any format:
$start_timespan = [timespan]::ParseExact($start_timestamp, 'hhmmss', $null)

Answer 2

We can do this by taking your input int and treating it like a string. Doing that lets us call ToCharArray() which does this.
$myString = "Hi!"
$myString.ToCharArray()
H
i
!
Once it's in a char array, we can select out the positions of the characters we want by specifying its index, starting with zero, like this:
PS> $myString.ToCharArray()[0] #get's the first
H
Applying that to your scenario, we do the same to select only the numbers we want and tuck them into variables to call on later. With that, we can easily build a new [TimeSpan] object.
$inputInt = 121515
$hours= $inputInt.ToString().ToCharArray()[0..1] -join ''
$mins= $inputInt.ToString().ToCharArray()[2..3] -join ''
$secs = $inputInt.ToString().ToCharArray()[4..5] -join ''
$hours,$mins,$secs -join ":"
Output> 12:15:15
There are a lot of options to make a new [TimeSpan], we can see our choices by typing the static class name and method, and seeing what comes up.
PS> [timespan]::new
OverloadDefinitions
-------------------
timespan new(long ticks)
timespan new(int hours, int minutes, int seconds)
timespan new(int days, int hours, int minutes, int seconds)
timespan new(int days, int hours, int minutes, int seconds, int milliseconds)
That second one looks promising...
$newTimeSpan = [TimeSpan]::new($hours,$mins,$secs)
$newTimeSpan
This should get you heading in the right direction.