For a news site I am currently working on, I needed to display the last time a news article was last published. I wanted to be able to show the duration based on respective major time format. For example, if an article was displayed a couple hours ago, I would want it to to display “2 hours” not “120 minutes”.
More importantly, if an article hadn’t been published to the site more than a week, I don’t want the exact time duration to be displayed. I would prefer the following message: “more than a week ago”. This way, if the site administrator gets really lazy the website viewer will not know the exact time period the site was last updated.
Code:
public class TimePassed
{
public static string GetPassedTime(DateTime since)
{
TimeSpan ts = DateTime.Now.Subtract(since);
if (ts.Days <= 7)
{
switch (ts.Days)
{
case 0:
switch (ts.Hours)
{
case 0:
switch (ts.Minutes)
{
case 0:
return String.Format("{0} seconds ago", ts.Seconds);
case 1:
return "1 minute ago";
default:
return String.Format("{0} minutes ago", ts.Minutes);
}
case 1:
return "1 hour ago";
default:
return String.Format("{0} hours ago", ts.Hours);
}
case 1:
return "yesterday";
default:
return String.Format("{0} days ago", ts.Days);
}
}
else
{
return "more than a week ago";
}
}
}