Question

I’m looking for a nice JS snippet to convert a timestamp (e.g. from Twitter API) to a nice user friendly relative time (e.g. 2 seconds ago, one week ago etc).

Anyone care to share some of their favourite methods (preferably not using plugins)?

Answer 1

Well it’s pretty easy if you aren’t overly concerned with accuracy. What wrong with the trivial method?

function timeDifference(current, previous) {

    var msPerMinute = 60 * 1000;
    var msPerHour = msPerMinute * 60;
    var msPerDay = msPerHour * 24;
    var msPerMonth = msPerDay * 30;
    var msPerYear = msPerDay * 365;

    var elapsed = current - previous;

    if (elapsed < msPerMinute) {
         return Math.round(elapsed/1000) + ' seconds ago';   
    }

    else if (elapsed < msPerHour) {
         return Math.round(elapsed/msPerMinute) + ' minutes ago';   
    }

    else if (elapsed < msPerDay ) {
         return Math.round(elapsed/msPerHour ) + ' hours ago';   
    }

    else if (elapsed < msPerMonth) {
        return 'approximately ' + Math.round(elapsed/msPerDay) + ' days ago';   
    }

    else if (elapsed < msPerYear) {
        return 'approximately ' + Math.round(elapsed/msPerMonth) + ' months ago';   
    }

    else {
        return 'approximately ' + Math.round(elapsed/msPerYear ) + ' years ago';   
    }
}

Working example here.

You might want to tweak it to handle the singular values better (e.g. 1 day instead of 1 days) if that bothers you.