TimeSpan to friendly string library (C#)

Question

Duplicate: This is one of the earliest question on StackOverflow posted by Jeff.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11/how-do-i-calculate-relative-time

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Does anyone know of a good library (or code snippet) for converting a TimeSpan object to a "friendly" string such as:

• Two years, three months and four days
• One week and two days

(It's for a document expiry system, where the expiry could be anything from a few days to several decades)

Just to clarify, say I had a TimeSpan with 7 days, that should print "1 week", 14 days "2 weeks", 366 days "1 year and 1 day", etc etc.

Answer 1

It probably won't do everything you are looking for, but in v4 Microsoft will be implementing IFormattable on TimeSpan.

Answer 2

The TimeSpan object has Days, Hours, Minutes, and Seconds properties on it, so it wouldn't be too hard to make a snippet that formats those values to a friendly string.

Unfortunately Days is the largest value. Anything longer than that and you'll have to start worrying about days in a month for every year...etc. You're better off stopping at days in my opinion (the added effort doesn't seem worth the gain).

UPDATE

...I figured I'd bring this up from my own comment:

Understandable, but is "This document expires in 10 years, 3 months, 21 days, 2 hours, and 30 minutes" really any more helpful or less silly? If it were up to me, since neither representation seems very useful...

I'd leave off the timespan for expiry until the date got reasonably close (30 or 60 days maybe if you're worried about getting the document updated).

Seems a much better UX choice to me.

Answer 3

To format any period longer than 1 day (i.e. month/year/decade etc.) a Timespan object is not enough.

Suppose your timespan is 35 days, then from Apr 1 you would get one month and five days, whereas from Dec 1 you would get one month and four days.

Answer 4

There is the Time Span Articulator:
http://weblog.cynosura.eu/post/2009/01/27/The-TimeSpan-Articulator.aspx

This link will get you numbers to english:

Converting an integer into English Words using C#.Net
http://www.hotblue.com/article0001.aspx

Answer 5

Not a fully featured implementation, but it should get you close enough.

DateTime dtNow = DateTime.Now;
DateTime dtYesterday = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-435.0);
TimeSpan ts = dtNow.Subtract(dtYesterday);

int years = ts.Days / 365; //no leap year accounting
int months = (ts.Days % 365) / 30; //naive guess at month size
int weeks = ((ts.Days % 365) % 30) / 7;
int days = (((ts.Days % 365) % 30) % 7);

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
if(years > 0)
{
    sb.Append(years.ToString() + " years, ");
}
if(months > 0)
{
    sb.Append(months.ToString() + " months, ");
}
if(weeks > 0)
{
    sb.Append(weeks.ToString() + " weeks, ");
}
if(days > 0)
{
    sb.Append(days.ToString() + " days.");
}
string FormattedTimeSpan = sb.ToString();

In the end, do you really need to let someone know a document is going to expire exactly 1 year, 5 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days from now? Can't you get by with telling them the document will expire over 1 year from now, or over 5 months from now? Just take the largest unit and say over n of that unit.

Answer 6

See how-do-i-calculate-relative-time, asked (by user number 1) a year ago when SO was young and not public. It was (probably) the basis for the current age display for SO questions and answers.

Answer 7

This is one of the earliest question on StackOverflow posted by Jeff.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11/how-do-i-calculate-relative-time

There are alot of great answers there.