How To Convert a Date Time to “X minutes ago” in C#

Friends,

In one of our previous post, we saw how can we convert a Date Time value to “X Minutes Ago” feature using jQuery. Today, in this post we will see how we can achieve the same functionality in C#. In this post we will write a C# function that will take a DateTime as a parameter and return us back the appropriate string. In case you want to convert a future date to a similar string, you can check my post here.

The function to convert DateTime to a “Time Ago” string is as below –

        public static string TimeAgo(DateTime dt)
        {
            if (dt > DateTime.Now)
                return "about sometime from now";
            TimeSpan span = DateTime.Now - dt;

            if (span.Days > 365)
            {
                int years = (span.Days / 365);
                if (span.Days % 365 != 0)
                    years += 1;
                return String.Format("about {0} {1} ago", years, years == 1 ? "year" : "years");
            }

            if (span.Days > 30)
            {
                int months = (span.Days / 30);
                if (span.Days % 31 != 0)
                    months += 1;
                return String.Format("about {0} {1} ago", months, months == 1 ? "month" : "months");
            }

            if (span.Days > 0)
                return String.Format("about {0} {1} ago", span.Days, span.Days == 1 ? "day" : "days");

            if (span.Hours > 0)
                return String.Format("about {0} {1} ago", span.Hours, span.Hours == 1 ? "hour" : "hours");

            if (span.Minutes > 0)
                return String.Format("about {0} {1} ago", span.Minutes, span.Minutes == 1 ? "minute" : "minutes");

            if (span.Seconds > 5)
                return String.Format("about {0} seconds ago", span.Seconds);

            if (span.Seconds < = 5)
                return "just now";

            return string.Empty;
        }

You can call the function something like below-

            Console.WriteLine(TimeAgo(DateTime.Now));
            Console.WriteLine(TimeAgo(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(-5)));
            Console.WriteLine(TimeAgo(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(-59)));
            Console.WriteLine(TimeAgo(DateTime.Now.AddHours(-2)));
            Console.WriteLine(TimeAgo(DateTime.Now.AddDays(-5)));
            Console.WriteLine(TimeAgo(DateTime.Now.AddMonths(-3)));

The output looks something like below –

Hope this post helps you. Keep learning and sharing!