I am doing a healthy amount of logging in a multi-threaded app, and I frequently need to output a TimeSpan value.  The default ToString() implementation for TimeSpan outputs the time in a 04:00:00 format, which isn’t as friendly to read as “4 hours”.

Here is a quick extension method that will give you this type of output. 

This code calls a Quanitify method, that is defined as:

…and the (naive) Pluralize() method looks like:

Notice that it only deals with 1 unit at a time, so if you have something like 36 hours it will treat it as 1.5 days (which is acceptable in my scenario).

The output looks like the table below:

TimeSpan.FromDays(1)	1 day
TimeSpan.FromDays(2)	2 days
TimeSpan.FromHours(36)	1.5 days
TimeSpan.FromHours(6)	6 hours
TimeSpan.FromHours(1)	1 hour
TimeSpan.FromMinutes(34)	34 minutes
TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1)	1 minute
TimeSpan.FromSeconds(70)	1.2 minutes
TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(800)	800 milliseconds