Question

In this website I’ve found a function to convert seconds in an human readable format, like this:

3 weeks, 2 days, 1 hour, 27 minutes, 52 seconds

I want to translate it in italian, so I just translated array keys. The function now is this

function secondsToHumanReadable($secs) {

$units = array(
'settimane' => 604800,
'giorni'    =>  86400,
'ore'       =>   3600,
'minuti'    =>     60,
'secondi'   =>      1
);

foreach ( $units as &$unit ) {
    $quot  = intval($secs / $unit);
    $secs -= $quot * $unit;
    $unit  = $quot;
}

return $units;
}

It works pretty well, but there’s a little problem: in english all the plurals ends with one letter less, but unfortunately in italian it’s not the same, as you can see below.

English             Italian    
- weeks, week       - settimane, settimana
- days, day         - giorni, giorno
- hours, hour       - ore, ora
- minutes, minute   - minuti, minuto
- seconds, second   - secondi, secondo

I want to find a solution to print singular keys when the values are == 1.

I was thinking that I could merge the array with another array that have singular keys, using array_combine().

$singular_units = array(
'settimana',
'giorno',
'ora',
'minuto',
'secondo'
);

print_r(array_combine( $singular_units, $units ));

/* print_r:
Array
(
    [settimana] => 604800
    [giorno] => 86400
    [ora] => 3600
    [minuto] => 60
    [secondo] => 1
)
*/

The array above is what I need, but I’m not able to use it, since I just cannot use another foreach.

$seconds = 12345*60; // just an example
$units = secondsToHumanReadable($seconds);              
$time_string = '';
foreach ($units as $u => $v)
    if (!empty($v))
        $time_string.= $v.' '.$u.', ';
echo substr($time_string, 0, -2);
// 1 settimane, 1 giorni, 13 ore, 45 minuti
// this echo is not correct :( is expected to be like this:
// 1 settimana, 1 giorno, 13 ore, 45 minuti

How could I implement the singular words?

Any help is really appreciated! Thank you so much in advance!

Answer 1

You can implement them any way you like, IMHO preferably something not like the current solution which lacks clarity and readability (at least that’s how the local-var-mutation-with-refs-and-variable-ping-pong looks like to me).

Just one possible solution:

$input = 12345 * 60;

$units = array(
    604800 => array('settimana', 'settimane'),
    86400 => array('giorno', 'giorni'),
    // etc
);

$result = array();
foreach($units as $divisor => $unitName) {
    $units = intval($input / $divisor);
    if ($units) {
        $input %= $divisor;
        $name = $units == 1 ? $unitName[0] : $unitName[1];
        $result[] = "$units $name";
    }
}

echo implode(', ', $result);

See it in action.