TimeSpan to English

Ever needed to convert a Time Span into human readable text ? Here’s a nifty little function to do just that.

/// <summary>
/// Returns a string containing the human readable version of this time span, i.e 4 days, 3 hours, 26 minutes and 13.4 seconds.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="timeSpan"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static string TimeSpanToText(TimeSpan timeSpan)
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(30);

    if (timeSpan.Days > 0)
    {
        sb.Append(timeSpan.Days);
        if (timeSpan.Days == 1)
            sb.Append(" day");
        else
            sb.Append(" days");
    }

    if (timeSpan.Hours > 0)
    {
        if (sb.Length > 1)
            sb.Append(", ");

        if (timeSpan.Minutes == 0 && timeSpan.Days > 0)
            sb.Append("and ");
        sb.Append(timeSpan.Hours);

        if (timeSpan.Hours == 1)
            sb.Append(" hour");
        else
            sb.Append(" hours");
    }

    if (timeSpan.Minutes > 0)
    {
        if (sb.Length > 0)
            sb.Append(", ");
        if (timeSpan.Seconds == 0 && timeSpan.Hours > 0)
            sb.Append("and ");
        sb.Append(timeSpan.Minutes);

        if (timeSpan.Minutes == 1)
            sb.Append(" minute");
        else
            sb.Append(" minutes");
    }

    if (timeSpan.Seconds > 0)
    {
        if (sb.Length > 0)
            sb.Append(", ");

        if (timeSpan.Minutes > 0)
            sb.Append("and ");
        sb.Append(timeSpan.Seconds);
        if (timeSpan.Milliseconds > 0)
        {
            sb.Append(".");
            sb.Append(timeSpan.Milliseconds);
        }

        if (timeSpan.Seconds == 1 && timeSpan.Milliseconds == 0)
            sb.Append(" second");
        else
            sb.Append(" seconds");
    }

    if (timeSpan.Milliseconds > 0 && timeSpan.Seconds == 0)
    {
        sb.Append(timeSpan.Milliseconds);
        if (timeSpan.Milliseconds == 1)
            sb.Append(" millisecond");
        else
            sb.Append(" milliseconds");

        sb.Append(" (");
        sb.Append(timeSpan.Ticks);
        sb.Append(" ticks)");
    }

    return sb.ToString();
}

Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Strings,TimeSpan,Human Readable