Question

I need to display a post time of the comment for a particular article or node. I need the post time of the comment in the format Time ago.

For example : 1 minute ago

Can there is any way to achieve the Time ago format display for comment display in drupal 7.

Answer 1

I think I remember there may be a native function that does this in D7 but have not found it. So meanwhile you could just have this function in a template:

function ago($timestamp){
   $difference = time() - $timestamp;
   $periods = array("second", "minute", "hour", "day", "week", "month", "years", "decade");
   $lengths = array("60","60","24","7","4.35","12","10");
   for($j = 0; $difference >= $lengths[$j]; $j++)
   $difference /= $lengths[$j];
   $difference = round($difference);
   if($difference != 1) $periods[$j].= "s";
   $text = "$difference $periods[$j] ago";
   return $text;
  }

Then, when you need to print a ‘time since’ type of date, for instance time since user has logged in:

   global $user;
   echo "Last login: ".ago($user->login);

Hope that helps, good luck.

PS – Consider posting upcoming questions on drupal.stackexchange.com your post will be targeted to many awesome Drupal devs there. Good-luck, happy coding.

Update – There IS a native function in Drupal to format date intervals, it is called format_interval.

Usage example:

 // Date since forum post was created
 format_interval(REQUEST_TIME - $variables['topic']->created) 

Much simpler like this.