Question

I’m creating comments stored in a MySQL database.

I’m logging the php time function time() as the comment is posted. That way it’s displaying a message such as… “comment… posted 4 seconds ago” and if I refresh the page 2 minutes later it’d display “comment… posted 2 minutes ago”

Here’s how I am entering time() into the database along with the other data:

$date=time();

// Insert data into mysql
$sql="INSERT INTO testimonials (username, comment, date) 
  VALUES ('$username', '$comment', '$date')";

Now… I grab the data like this:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result) )
{
  echo "<b>Random Comment</b></br>";
  echo ("<p>\n> $row[1]"); //comment
  echo ("</br>-$row[0]</p>"); //name
  echo ("</br>$row[2]"); //date

The sample output on my server is:

Random Comment

This is the most awesome comment thing ever!!!!

-Kyle

1278905319

How could I convert the time “1278905319” into a readable format such as, “posted 4 seconds ago” or something that deals with seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years?

Is PHP the wrong way to do it? I read about MySQL timestamping but I don’t understand that or how to make it work in my case.

So my main question is, how to format the time into a readable time on output. “2 seconds ago”

Thank you. =)

Answer 1

Here’s a function I found here, written by one John McClumpha:

<?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;
}