TimeSpan “pretty time” format in C#

Question

Typing in the title to this question brought me to this question. I\'m looking for the same thing, but something perhaps less statically formatted if you get what I mean?

Answer 1

And if you care about pluralization:

public static string ToPrettyFormat(this TimeSpan span) {

    if (span == TimeSpan.Zero) return "0 minutes";

    var sb = new StringBuilder();
    if (span.Days > 0)
        sb.AppendFormat("{0} day{1} ", span.Days, span.Days > 1 ? "s" : String.Empty);
    if (span.Hours > 0)
        sb.AppendFormat("{0} hour{1} ", span.Hours, span.Hours > 1 ? "s" : String.Empty);
    if (span.Minutes > 0)
        sb.AppendFormat("{0} minute{1} ", span.Minutes, span.Minutes > 1 ? "s" : String.Empty);
    return sb.ToString();

}

Answer 2

You can just output this directly:

 string result = string.Format("{0} days, {1} hours, {2} minutes", duration.Days, duration.Hours, duration.Minutes);

If you are going to be handling "short" times, and you want this to be cleaner, you could do something like:

public string PrettyFormatTimeSpan(TimeSpan span)
{
    if (span.Days > 0)
         return string.Format("{0} days, {1} hours, {2} minutes", span.Days, span.Hours, span.Minutes);
    if (span.Hours > 0)
         return string.Format("{0} hours, {1} minutes", span.Hours, span.Minutes);

    return  string.Format("{0} minutes", span.Minutes);
}

Answer 3

With C# 7:

string FormatTimeSpan(TimeSpan timeSpan)
{
    string FormatPart(int quantity, string name) => quantity > 0 ? $"{quantity} {name}{(quantity > 1 ? "s" : "")}" : null;
    return string.Join(", ", new[] { FormatPart(timeSpan.Days, "day"), FormatPart(timeSpan.Hours, "hour"), FormatPart(timeSpan.Minutes, "minute") }.Where(x => x != null));
}