How to display shortened versions of time units

[Drammy]

I'd like to show "ms" instead of "milliseconds" on TimeSpan.Humanize.

Is this possible?

[diogorodrigues03]

Hello!

Currently, Humanizer is designed for natural language prose (e.g., '2 minutes, 400 milliseconds') rather than technical abbreviations. There isn't a built-in parameter for 'ms'.

However, a clean way to handle this in your project is to create a small extension method that maps the full units to their abbreviations. This keeps the 'humanized' logic while giving you the short format you need:

using Humanizer;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

public static class HumanizerExtensions
{
    private static readonly Dictionary<string, string> Abbreviations = new()
    {
        { "millisecond", "ms" },
        { "second", "s" },
        { "minute", "min" },
        { "hour", "h" },
        { "day", "d" }
    };

    public static string HumanizeShort(this TimeSpan timeSpan, int precision = 1)
    {
        string humanized = timeSpan.Humanize(precision);

        foreach (var pair in Abbreviations)
        {
            // Matches the word, its plural, and handles word boundaries
            humanized = Regex.Replace(humanized, $@"\b{pair.Key}s?\b", pair.Value);
        }

        return humanized;
    }
}

// Usage:
// TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(400).HumanizeShort(); // "400 ms"
// TimeSpan.FromSeconds(62).HumanizeShort(2);      // "1 min, 2 s"

There are some performance optimizations you can make if you want, but hope this helps! 😄