Question

I am looking for a method of splitting a date range into a series of date ranges by chunk size of days. I am planning on using this to buffer calls to a service which if the date range is too large, the service faults.

This is what I have come up with so far. It seems to work, but I am not sure if it will exit properly. This seems like something that has probably been done several times before, but I can’t find it.

public IEnumerable<Tuple<DateTime, DateTime>> SplitDateRange(DateTime start, DateTime end, int dayChunkSize)
{
    var newStart = start;
    var newEnd = start.AddDays(dayChunkSize);

    while (true)
    {
        yield return new Tuple<DateTime, DateTime>(newStart, newEnd);

        if (newEnd == end)
            yield break;

        newStart = newStart.AddDays(dayChunkSize);
        newEnd = (newEnd.AddDays(dayChunkSize) > end ? end : newEnd.AddDays(dayChunkSize));
    }
}

I’m looking for improvement suggestions, or “Dude, use this existing function for this!”

Answer 1

I think your code fails when the difference between start and end is smaller than dayChunkSize.
See this:

var singleRange = SplitDateRange(DateTime.Now, DateTime.Now.AddDays(7), dayChunkSize: 15).ToList();
Debug.Assert(singleRange.Count == 1);

Proposed solution:

public static IEnumerable<Tuple<DateTime, DateTime>> SplitDateRange(DateTime start, DateTime end, int dayChunkSize)
{
    DateTime chunkEnd;
    while ((chunkEnd = start.AddDays(dayChunkSize)) < end)
    {
        yield return Tuple.Create(start, chunkEnd);
        start = chunkEnd;
    }
    yield return Tuple.Create(start, end);
}