PHP Date in Human Readable Form (Facebook Style)
Apr.01, 2008 in
Development
I like to display dates relative to now, aka Facebook. So instead of displaying a date in the form 3-2-2008 (which can get confusing if you are in the US/Europe etc with dates being switched) I like to show it as 2 weeks ago as this is far easier to read.
So I came accross the following function which produces these dates in PHP:
function RelativeTime($timestamp){
$difference = time() - $timestamp;
$periods = array("sec", "min", "hour", "day", "week",
"month", "years", "decade");
$lengths = array("60","60","24","7","4.35","12","10");
if ($difference > 0) { // this was in the past
$ending = "ago";
} else { // this was in the future
$difference = -$difference;
$ending = "to go";
}
for($j = 0; $difference >= $lengths[$j]; $j++)
$difference /= $lengths[$j];
$difference = round($difference);
if($difference != 1) $periods[$j].= "s";
$text = "$difference $periods[$j] $ending";
return $text;
}
Original post is here.
Tags: Php
December 5th, 2008 at 6:51 am
Just what I was looking for. Thanks for saving me some work!
May 27th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Thanks for this post – nice one, gave me the needed inspiration for a function I was writing.
August 23rd, 2009 at 8:51 am
Hello,
Thanks for this. today I have used it. great thing indeed.
March 11th, 2010 at 6:08 am
This version is better, because the posted one has some problems with decades. This version is also translated to SPANISH HUMAN READABLE DATE, which is almost the same as ENGLISH VERSION.
function relativeTime($timestamp){
$difference = time() – $timestamp;
$periods = array(“segundo”, “minuto”, “hora”, “día”, “semana”, “mes”, “año”, “década”);
$lengths = array(“60″,”60″,”24″,”7″,”4.35″,”12″,”10″);
if ($difference > 0) { // this was in the past
$starting = “Hace”;
} else { // this was in the future
$difference = -$difference;
$starting = “Falta”;
}
$j = 0;
while ($difference >= $lengths[$j] && $j < count($lengths)) {
$difference /= $lengths[$j];
$j++;
}
$difference = round($difference);
if($difference != 1) $periods[$j].= ($periods[$j]!="mes")?"s":"es";
$text = "$starting $difference $periods[$j]";
return $text;
}