Format time and date output of PowerShell New-TimeSpan

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Emanuel Halapciuc

Emanuel is an IT consultant who has worked for 20 years in the industry. He is currently involved in a deployment project for the European Commission and focuses on Active Directory, Group Policy, Azure, and automation with PowerShell.

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My function displays the number of weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. For short time spans, Prerequisites

My function works with any version of PowerShell that supports the PowerShell New-Timespan cmdlet. Basically, this means that any currently available PowerShell version is supported. You can test whether New-Timespan is available on your system like this:

Get-Command New-TimeSpan

Testing support for Get TimeSpanPretty

If you receive an output like in the screenshot above, you can use Get-TimespanPretty.

Examples

Let's see Get-TimespanPretty in action. I like to learn by example. For more details and a formal description of the function, you can run Get-Help, as shown below.

Get-Help Get-TimeSpanPretty

or

Get-Help Get-TimeSpanPretty -Examples

Use with New-TimeSpan

Simply pipe the output of New-TimeSpan to Get-TimespanPretty to get a simpler, prettier format for the time interval. In the example below, you'll first see the original output, and then you'll get the more human-friendly format created by my function.

New-TimeSpan -Start "2022-09-15 14:55" -End "2022-10-05 11:20:05"
New-TimeSpan -Start "2022-09-15 14:55" -End "2022-10-05 11:20:05" | Get-TimeSpanPretty

Get TimeSpanPretty provides a more concise way to view a time interval

Measure the execution time of a script with New-TimeSpan

As before, you can use New-TimeSpan to measure the time it took to run one or more PowerShell commands. This can be very useful for measuring scripts that need to run a long time to complete their task.

$StartTime = Get-Date

# your (long-running) commands go here
# Optimize-VHD -Path C:\VMs\FS1-UserData.vhdx -Mode Full
# Get-Aduser -Filter {Department -like "*Manager*"} | Remove-ADUser -Confirm:$false

$EndTime = Get-Date

New-TimeSpan -Start $StartTime -End $EndTime | Get-TimeSpanPretty 

Measuring the time it takes to run a PowerShell command

As you can see in the screenshot above, it took the PowerShell script one minute and 48 seconds to complete the task.

Measure the execution time of a script with Measure-Command

Another way to measure the execution time of a script is to use Measure-Command. As before, I'll pipe the output to Get-TimespanPretty.

Measure-Command {Get-Service | foreach {Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 15}} 
Measure-Command {Get-Service | foreach {Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 15}} | Get-TimeSpanPretty 

Another way to measure the duration of one or more commands

As in the previous example, you first see the raw output and then the human-friendly version created by my function.

The Get-TimespanPretty function

Below, you'll find the complete code for my Get-TimespanPretty function. Instead of playing the copy-and-paste game every time you need it, you can include it in your PowerShell profile script or in a module.

Function Get-TimeSpanPretty {
<#
.Synopsis
   Displays the time span between two dates in a single line, in an easy-to-read format
.DESCRIPTION
   Only non-zero weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds are displayed.
   If the time span is less than a second, the function display "Less than a second."
.PARAMETER TimeSpan
   Uses the TimeSpan object as input that will be converted into a human-friendly format
.EXAMPLE
   Get-TimeSpanPretty -TimeSpan $TimeSpan
   Displays the value of $TimeSpan on a single line as number of weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
.EXAMPLE
   $LongTimeSpan | Get-TimeSpanPretty
   A timeline object is accepted as input from the pipeline. 
   The result is the same as in the previous example.
.OUTPUTS
   String(s)
.NOTES
   Last changed on 28 July 2022
#>

    [CmdletBinding()]
    Param
    (
        # Param1 help description
        [Parameter(Mandatory,ValueFromPipeline)][ValidateNotNull()][timespan]$TimeSpan
    )

    Begin {}
    Process{

        # Initialize $TimeSpanPretty, in case there is more than one timespan in the input via pipeline
        [string]$TimeSpanPretty = ""
    
        $Ts = [ordered]@{
            Weeks   = [math]::Floor($TimeSpan.Days / 7)
            Days    = [int]$TimeSpan.Days % 7
            Hours   = [int]$TimeSpan.Hours
            Minutes = [int]$TimeSpan.Minutes
            Seconds = [int]$TimeSpan.Seconds
        } 

        # Process each item in $Ts (week, day, etc.)
        foreach ($i in $Ts.Keys){

            # Skip if zero
            if ($Ts.$i -ne 0) {
                
                # Append the value and key to the string
                $TimeSpanPretty += "{0} {1}, " -f $Ts.$i,$i
                
            } #Close if
    
        } #Close for
    
    # If the $TimeSpanPretty is not 0 (which could happen if start and end time are identical.)
    if ($TimeSpanPretty.Length -ne 0){

        # delete the last coma and space
        $TimeSpanPretty = $TimeSpanPretty.Substring(0,$TimeSpanPretty.Length-2)
    }
    else {
        
        # Display "Less than a second" instead of an empty string.
        $TimeSpanPretty = "Less than a second"
    }

    $TimeSpanPretty

    } # Close Process

    End {}

} #Close function Get-TimeSpanPretty

Summary

My function, Get-TimeSpanPretty, gives you a quick and easy way to convert TimeSpan objects into a user-friendly format. You can include it in your scripts or PowerShell-generated reports for better-looking output.