Question

I have a begin and start DateTime for a conversion that gets logged at the start and end of this event. I then generate a report that lists a bunch of information about the event including its runtime. I have a column for total time elapsed (in days) and a date representation of start and stop. Everything is in days, I don’t care about hours/minutes/seconds.

If the start time is 9/29/2010 and the end time is 9/31/2010 I want to print:

9/29-31/2010

If the start time is 9/29/2010 and the end time is 10/2/2010 I want to print:

9/29-10/2/2010

If the start time is 12/29/2010 and the end time is 1/2/2011 I want to print:

12/29/2010-1/2/2011

I know I can use the ToString(“M/d/yyyy”) method of datetime to print each individual date, but I’m hoping for an easy way to print two dates in a similar format.

Answer 1

Your rules are pretty simple to translate to code, no need to get fancy.

static string GetDateRangeString(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate)
{
    if (endDate.Year != startDate.Year)
    {
        return startDate.ToString("M/d/yyyy") + "-" + endDate.ToString("M/d/yyyy");
    }
    else if (endDate.Month != startDate.Month)
    {
        return startDate.ToString("M/d") + "-" + endDate.ToString("M/d/yyyy");
    }
    else
    {
        return startDate.ToString("M/d") + "-" + endDate.ToString("d/yyyy");
    }
}

Demos:

Console.WriteLine(GetDateRangeString(new DateTime(2010, 9, 29), new DateTime(2010, 9, 30)));
Console.WriteLine(GetDateRangeString(new DateTime(2010, 9, 29), new DateTime(2010, 10, 30)));
Console.WriteLine(GetDateRangeString(new DateTime(2010, 9, 29), new DateTime(2011, 1, 30)));