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Anton Martyniuk
Anton Martyniuk

Posted on Originally published at antondevtips.com

Humanizer in .NET: Turn Strings, Dates, and Numbers Into Human-Friendly Text

#programming #csharp #dotnet #productivity

Software stores data the way machines like it. Users want to read it the way humans like it.

So you write this boilerplate code every day.

You manually split a PascalCase enum into words. You turn 2 into "2nd" with a few if statements.

You format a timestamp as "3 hours ago". You pluralize "item" only when the count is not 1.

It is a few lines here, a helper method there - and it piles up across a codebase.

Humanizer is a small, free .NET library that does all of it for you.

It turns developer-shaped data into human-friendly text with a single method call.

In this post, we will explore:

  • How to Humanize and transform strings
  • How to Humanize enums
  • How to Humanize dates and times
  • How to Turn numbers into words
  • How to Work with culture
  • How to Pluralize and quantify
  • How to Format byte sizes and large numbers
  • Bonus: Roman numerals, collections, and fluent dates

Let's dive in.

👉 Read original article on my newsletter: https://antondevtips.com/blog/humanizer-in-dotnet-turn-strings-dates-and-numbers-into-human-friendly-text

How to Humanize and Transform Strings

First, add Humanizer to your project by installing the following NuGet package:

dotnet add package Humanizer
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The core of Humanizer is Humanize(), which turns a developer string into a readable sentence.

It splits strings in PascalCase, camelCase, snake_case, kebab-case, all in lower or UPPER case, into words and applies sentence casing:

"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"
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Transform changes the casing without splitting words. It takes one or more strategies:

"Sentence casing".Transform(To.TitleCase);    // => "Sentence Casing"
"Sentence casing".Transform(To.LowerCase);    // => "sentence casing"
"Sentence casing".Transform(To.SentenceCase); // => "Sentence casing"
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Dehumanize is the reverse of Humanize - it turns a sentence back into a PascalCase identifier:

"Pascal case input string is turned into sentence".Dehumanize();
// => "PascalCaseInputStringIsTurnedIntoSentence"
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And Truncate shortens text to a length, adding an ellipsis:

"Long text to truncate".Truncate(10);
// => "Long text…"
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These four cover most of the string formatting you write by hand: generating labels, display names, and identifiers from code.

How to Humanize Enums

Enum names are in PascalCase, and your UI needs readable labels.

Normally, you map each enum member to a label by hand:

var label = status switch
{
    ShipmentStatus.OutForDelivery => "Out for delivery",
    ShipmentStatus.InTransit => "In transit",
    // ... a line for every member
};
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Calling Humanize() on the enum value does the same thing for free. It splits the name into words, so the switch disappears:

public enum ShipmentStatus
{
    Pending,
    InTransit,
    OutForDelivery,
    Delivered
}

ShipmentStatus.OutForDelivery.Humanize();  // => "Out for delivery"
ShipmentStatus.InTransit.Humanize();       // => "In transit"
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When you need a label that does not match the member name, add a [Description] attribute and Humanizer uses it:

public enum ShipmentStatus
{
    [Description("Awaiting pickup")]
    Pending,
    // ...
}

ShipmentStatus.Pending.Humanize();  // => "Awaiting pickup"
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You can also go the other way, turning a display string back into the enum value with DehumanizeTo:

"Out for delivery".DehumanizeTo<ShipmentStatus>();
// => ShipmentStatus.OutForDelivery
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This alone removes a surprising amount of mapping code from the boundary between your domain and your UI.

👉 Read original article on my newsletter: https://antondevtips.com/blog/humanizer-in-dotnet-turn-strings-dates-and-numbers-into-human-friendly-text

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