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

In one of our previous posts, 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 the appropriate string.

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

public static string TimeAgo(DateTime dt)
{
    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!