Human-readable date formats

Question

You may have noticed that certain web applications (for example, certain parts of GMail) display dates in a more human-readable format than simply DD/MM/YYYY.

For example, if I open up a mail item from the 23rd (which happens to be 3 days ago at the time of writing, I'll get the following:

Dec 23 (3 days ago)

I'd like to implement similar logic to this in my own web application.

For example, when dealing with a .NET TimeSpan object, I'd like to convert it to text such as the following:

2 months

3 days

Is there a .NET library capable of doing this already?

If not I might build something basic and open-source it.

I've made a basic start here:

public static class TimeSpanHelpers
{
    public static string ToHumanReadableString(
        this TimeSpan timeSpan)
    {
        if (timeSpan.TotalDays > 30)
            return (timeSpan.TotalDays / 30) + " month(s)";

        if (timeSpan.TotalDays > 7)
            return (timeSpan.TotalDays / 7) + " week(s)";

        return (timeSpan.TotalDays) + " day(s)";
    }
}

See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11/how-do-i-calculate-relative-time — Christian C. Salvadó, Dec 26 '09 at 07:21
Awesome... I knew someone would be asking this but couldn't figure out what terms to type into the search box. — Jonathan, Dec 26 '09 at 07:38
I've got a simple algorithm for that on my blog that you could extend: http://www.robfe.com/2009/09/timeago-for-csharp/ Not very different to yours I'm afraid... — Rob Fonseca-Ensor, Dec 26 '09 at 07:27
See also this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11/how-do-i-calculate-relative-time There you'll find several C# implementations for relative time (i.e. "5 mins ago", "10 days ago"). — Juha Syrjälä, Dec 26 '09 at 10:32

Sam7 · Answer 1 · 2014-11-04T14:01:06.537

Try Humanizer http://humanizr.net/

TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(1299630020).Humanize(3) => "2 weeks, 1 day, 1 hour"

// in de-DE culture
TimeSpan.FromDays(1).Humanize() => "Ein Tag"
TimeSpan.FromDays(2).Humanize() => "2 Tage"

// in sk-SK culture
TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(1).Humanize() => "1 milisekunda"

// and a lot more
DateTime.UtcNow.AddHours(2).Humanize() => "2 hours from now"
"case".ToQuantity(5) => "5 cases"
"man".ToQuantity(2) => "2 men"
122.ToWords() => "one hundred and twenty-two"
(.5).Gigabytes().Humanize() => "512 MB"
"Long text to truncate".Truncate(10) => "Long text…",
"Sentence casing".Transform(To.TitleCase) => "Sentence Casing"

Nuget:

Install-Package Humanizer

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 28 '15 at 05:19

7

The Noda Time group is in the process of doing just this. Come on over and join the fun. Forgot to mention the project location Noda Time project

edited Jan 28 '15 at 05:19

User 12345678

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answered Dec 26 '09 at 07:20

James Keesey

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Cool stuff! I'll head over there. – Jonathan Dec 26 '09 at 07:39
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Looks cool. Can you give us an idea where in the Node Time project we should look. – heneryville May 17 '13 at 13:58
1

Have you done it? It's been almost 10 years since :) – tymtam Oct 24 '19 at 03:31

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 17 '11 at 01:29

1

Another library for doing this: http://relativetime.codeplex.com/

(Available on NuGet)

answered May 17 '11 at 01:29

Jonathan

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It works okay, but can't seem to do future dates (eg, I want it to say "in 2 days") – Matthew Lock Mar 03 '16 at 23:23

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

0

I ended up using this method as I needed to support future dates like 3 days from now.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

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answered Mar 03 '16 at 23:12

Matthew Lock

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Human-readable date formats

4 Answers4