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)";
    }
}

Answer 1

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