NuGet Package of the Week: Humanizer makes .NET data types more human

The .NET BCL (Base Class Library) moves too slow, IMHO. That's why NuGet and NuGet packages are so nice. It's a joy to find a "rightly sized" library like NodaTime, for example. It's a better date and time API for .NET. Microsoft should just use it, it's lovely.

Another nicely-sized Open Source library, and the focus for today's blog post, is Humanizer from http://humanizr.net. They say "Humanizer meets all your .NET needs for manipulating and displaying strings, enums, dates, times, timespans, numbers and quantities" and it does just that.

It's a lovely joy of a library and you should check it out. Just make yourself a console app now and install-package Humanizer, and explore.

Note: Be sure to check out all the NuGet packages of the week! There's more!

The word "Humanize" evokes, for me, a feeling of making something simpler, more accessible, more useful, more fluent, more flexible.

Here's some great examples of problems that Humanizer solves.

First, Humanzer has a LOT of extension methods to the string type. If you've got a funky string, it will turn it into as close to a normally-cased sentence as possible. This is even more useful if you're using BDD frameworks like BDDfy.

"PascalCaseInputStringIsTurnedIntoSentence".Humanize() => "Pascal case input string is turned into sentence"

"Underscored_input_string_is_turned_into_sentence".Humanize() => "Underscored input string is turned into sentence"

// acronyms are left intact
"HTML".Humanize() => "HTML" 

"Can_return_title_Case".Humanize(LetterCasing.Title) => "Can Return Title Case"

"CanReturnLowerCase".Humanize(LetterCasing.LowerCase) => "can return lower case"

There's dozens of great string methods, but it's the DateTime extension methods that really shine. These will feel familiar to Rails developers and Twitter users.

DateTime.UtcNow.AddHours(-30).Humanize() => "yesterday"
DateTime.UtcNow.AddHours(-2).Humanize() => "2 hours ago"

DateTime.UtcNow.AddHours(30).Humanize() => "tomorrow"
DateTime.UtcNow.AddHours(2).Humanize() => "2 hours from now"

TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(1299630020).Humanize() => "2 weeks"
TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(1299630020).Humanize(3) => "2 weeks, 1 day, 1 hour"

Pluralization libraries are always fun, as I've blogged before and Humanizer doesn't disappoint. You can pluralize and singularlize strings, but the "To Quantity" methods are fantastic, doing exactly what you'd expect, even if you do something odd:

"men".ToQuantity(2) => "2 men"
"process".ToQuantity(2) => "2 processes"
"process".ToQuantity(1) => "1 process"
"processes".ToQuantity(1) => "1 process"
"case".ToQuantity(0) => "0 cases"
"case".ToQuantity(1) => "1 case"

Even as words!

"case".ToQuantity(5, ShowQuantityAs.Words) => "five cases"

The Number to Words family of methods go even further:

3501.ToWords() => "three thousand five hundred and one"
121.ToOrdinalWords() => "hundred and twenty first"
8.ToRoman() => "VIII"

We've all written a truncate method to take a long string and add "..." at the end.

"Long text to truncate".Truncate(6, Truncator.FixedNumberOfCharacters) => "Long t…"

"Long text to truncate".Truncate(6, "---", Truncator.FixedNumberOfCharacters) => "Lon---"

I'm just scratching the surface of Humanizer, going through it's Getting Started. There's also samples where you can plug it into your own frameworks or deep within ASP.NET MVC and humanize enums, type names, and properties as a way to keep your code DRY.

Humanizer is even starting to support localization to non-English languages, and helping with the localization of Humanizer is a GREAT OPPORTUNITY if you're looking to get into Open Source as well as learning Git and GitHub Flow.

I like open source libraries like this that look like the code we've all written before...except tested and complete. ;) We've all written utilities like this, except as one-of functions. I look forward to NOT writing methods like this in the future, and instead using libraries like Humanizer. I fully plan to use this library in my next project (a startup I'm working on.)

Go take a look at Humanizer and thank the author on Twitter while you're at it!

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