Question

I have a todo list app I’m working on. It displays the timestamp from when a todo was created and even allows the user to choose what the format should be.

In this snippet, the code grabs info from a mySQL db to see how to format the date:

public function __toString(){
    // The string we return is outputted by the echo statement

    if ( $this->data['date_created'] == '') {
        $date_created =  date($GLOBALS["config"]["date_format"].' '.$GLOBALS["config"]["time_format"]);
    }
    else 
        $date_created = date($GLOBALS["config"]["date_format"].' '.$GLOBALS["config"]["time_format"], strtotime($this->data['date_created']));

(It’s pulling from a row called date_format and a row called time_format)

I’m trying to implement this code:

function relativeTime($dt,$precision=2) {
    if(is_string($dt)) $dt = strtotime($dt);

    $times=array(   365*24*60*60    => "year",
                    30*24*60*60     => "month",
                    7*24*60*60      => "week",
                    24*60*60        => "day",
                    60*60           => "hour",
                    60              => "minute",
                    1               => "second");

    $passed=time()-$dt;

    if($passed<5)
    {
        $output='less than 5 seconds ago';
    }
    else
    {
        $output=array();
        $exit=0;

        foreach($times as $period=>$name)
        {
            if($exit>=$precision || ($exit>0 && $period<60)) break;

            $result = floor($passed/$period);
            if($result>0)
            {
                $output[]=$result.' '.$name.($result==1?'':'s');
                $passed-=$result*$period;
                $exit++;
            }
            else if($exit>0) $exit++;
        }

        $output=implode(' and ',$output).' ago';
    }

    return $output;
}

I replaced $dt with $date_created and tried different combos, but I can’t seem to get it right. I have a frontend error telling me that relativetime is undefined (it doesn’t say relativeTime in error message, it has a lowercase “t”). What can I do to get $date_created to show up in the “Days ago” format? Thanks!

Answer 1

I would rewrite this completely as something like this:

$times = array(365*24*60*60    => "year",
               30*24*60*60     => "month",
               7*24*60*60      => "week",
               24*60*60        => "day",
               60*60           => "hour",
               60              => "minute",
               1               => "second");

$passed = time() - $dt;

if ($passed < 5) {
    echo "Less than 5 seconds ago.";
} else {
    foreach ($times as $period => $name) {
        if ($passed >= $period) {
            echo round($passed / $period) . " " . $name . "(s) ago";
            break;
        }
    }
}

See this link for an example (I’ve hardcoded the value of $passed for testing purposes; you can edit the value to see how it affects things):

http://ideone.com/e8KXK

---

As an aside, I’ve realized that I think your original solution attempts to fully account for every second that has passed. This is a bad idea from a user experience perspective. I don’t think many users will want to see “Created 1 year and 7 months and 19 days and 4 hours and 36 minutes and 28 seconds ago”, which is the type of result that your original code was shooting for. This answer will only display the largest unit.