Given a DateTime
representing a person's birthday, how do I calculate their age in years?
original title: ".net - How do I calculate someone's age in C#?"
Given a DateTime
representing a person's birthday, how do I calculate their age in years?
Ha egy személy születésnapját ábrázolja a DateTime szerint, hogyan számolhatom meg életkorát évben?
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An easy to understand and simple solution.
However, this assumes you are looking for the western idea of age and not using East Asian reckoning.
This is a strange way to do it, but if you format the date to
yyyymmdd
and subtract the date of birth from the current date then drop the last 4 digits you've got the age :)I don't know C#, but I believe this will work in any language.
Drop the last 4 digits =
28
.C# Code:
Or alternatively without all the type conversion in the form of an extension method. Error checking omitted:
I don't know how the wrong solution can be accepted. The correct C# snippet was written by Michael Stum
Here is a test snippet:
Here you have the methods:
I don't think any of the answers so far provide for cultures that calculate age differently. See, for example, East Asian Age Reckoning versus that in the West.
Any real answer has to include localization. The Strategy Pattern would probably be in order in this example.
The simple answer to this is to apply
AddYears
as shown below because this is the only native method to add years to the 29th of Feb. of leap years and obtain the correct result of the 28th of Feb. for common years.Some feel that 1th of Mar. is the birthday of leaplings but neither .Net nor any official rule supports this, nor does common logic explain why some born in February should have 75% of their birthdays in another month.
Further, an Age method lends itself to be added as an extension to
DateTime
. By this you can obtain the age in the simplest possible way:int age = birthDate.Age();
Now, run this test:
The critical date example is this:
Birth date: 2000-02-29 Later date: 2011-02-28 Age: 11
Output:
And for the later date 2012-02-28:
My suggestion
That seems to have the year changing on the right date. (I spot tested up to age 107)
Another function, not by me but found on the web and refined it a bit:
Just two things that come into my mind: What about people from countries that do not use the gregorian calendar? DateTime.Now is in the server-specific culture i think. I have absolutely 0 knowledge about actually working with Asian calendars and I do not know if there is an easy way to convert dates between calendars, but just in case you're wondering about those chinese guys from the year 4660 :-)
2 Main problems to solve are:
1. Calculate Exact age - in years, months, days, etc.
2. Calculate Generally perceived age - people usually do not care how old they exactly are, they just care when their birthday in the current year is.
Solution for 1 is obvious:
Solution for 2 is the one which is not so precise in determing total age, but is perceived as precise by people. People also usually use it, when they calculate their age "manually":
Notes to 2.:
Just one more note ... I would create 2 static overloaded methods for it, one for universal usage, second for usage-friendliness:
I am late to the party, but here's a one-liner:
This is the version we use here. It works, and it's fairly simple. It's the same idea as Jeff's but I think it's a little clearer because it separates out the logic for subtracting one, so it's a little easier to understand.
You could expand the ternary operator to make it even clearer, if you think that sort of thing is unclear.
Obviously this is done as an extension method on
DateTime
, but clearly you can grab that one line of code that does the work and put it anywhere. Here we have another overload of the Extension method that passes inDateTime.Now
, just for completeness.The best way that I know of because of leap years and everything is:
Hope this helps.
I use this:
This gives "more detail" to this question. Maybe this is what you're looking for
I have created a SQL Server User Defined Function to calculate someone's age, given their birthdate. This is useful when you need it as part of a query:
Here's yet another answer:
This has been extensively unit-tested. It does look a bit "magic". The number 372 is the number of days there would be in a year if every month had 31 days.
The explanation of why it works (lifted from here) is:
I've spent some time working on this and came up with this to calculate someone's age in years, months and days. I've tested against the Feb 29th problem and leap years and it seems to work, I'd appreciate any feedback:
Do we need to consider people who is smaller than 1 year? as Chinese culture, we describe small babies' age as 2 months or 4 weeks.
Below is my implementation, it is not as simple as what I imagined, especially to deal with date like 2/28.
This implementation has passed below test cases.
Hope it's helpful.
Keeping it simple (and possibly stupid:)).
I'm not sure how exactly you'd like it returned to you, so I just made a readable string.
The simplest way I've ever found is this. It works correctly for the US and western europe locales. Can't speak to other locales, especially places like China. 4 extra compares, at most, following the initial computation of age.
I was looking over the answers to this and noticed that nobody has made reference to regulatory/legal implications of leap day births. For instance, per Wikipedia, if you're born on February 29th in various jurisdictions, you're non-leap year birthday varies:
And as near as I can tell, in the US, the statutes are silent on the matter, leaving it up to the common law and to how various regulatory bodies define things in their regulations.
To that end, an improvement:
It should be noted that this code assumes:
This is not a direct answer, but more of a philosophical reasoning about the problem at hand from a quasi-scientific point of view.
I would argue that the question does not specify the unit nor culture in which to measure age, most answers seem to assume an integer annual representation. The SI-unit for time is
second
, ergo the correct generic answer should be (of course assuming normalizedDateTime
and taking no regard whatsoever to relativistic effects):In the Christian way of calculating age in years:
In finance there is a similar problem when calculating something often referred to as the Day Count Fraction, which roughly is a number of years for a given period. And the age issue is really a time measuring issue.
Example for the actual/actual (counting all days "correctly") convention:
Another quite common way to measure time generally is by "serializing" (the dude who named this date convention must seriously have been trippin'):
I wonder how long we have to go before a relativistic age in seconds becomes more useful than the rough approximation of earth-around-sun-cycles during one's lifetime so far :) Or in other words, when a period must be given a location or a function representing motion for itself to be valid :)
Here is a solution.
This is one of the most accurate answer that is able to resolve the birthday of 29th of Feb compare to any year of 28th Feb.
I have a customized method to calculate age, plus a bonus validation message just in case it helps:
Method call here and pass out datetime value (MM/dd/yyyy if server set to USA locale). Replace this with anything a messagebox or any container to display:
Remember you can format the message any way you like.
How about this solution?
The following approach (extract from Time Period Library for .NET class DateDiff) considers the calendar of the culture info:
Usage:
I used ScArcher2's solution for an accurate Year calculation of a persons age but I needed to take it further and calculate their Months and Days along with the Years.
SQL version:
This classic question is deserving of a Noda Time solution.
Usage:
You might also be interested in the following improvements:
Passing in the clock as an
IClock
, instead of usingSystemClock.Instance
, would improve testability.The target time zone will likely change, so you'd want a
DateTimeZone
parameter as well.See also my blog post on this subject: Handling Birthdays, and Other Anniversaries