The more I used Dean Landolt’s script, the more problems I began to see with his implementation. It was a good start, but definitely had bugs. His assumptions translating from integer second differences to human readable labels stretched too far at times (there is an error in logic to say anything between 24 hours and 48 hours from now can be labeled “Tomorrow”), and he was a bit loose with his difference categories (assumed average month length was 28 days, and always used Math.floor instead of rounding — 47 hours from now would be labeled “1 Day”). It was great code otherwise, and I definitely liked the way he used the while loop to run through the comparisons.

So, I’ve cleaned up his great start, and am releasing it to the world in the spirit of cooperation and open sauce. You just read that typo out loud didn’t you?

Download: Yet Another Pretty Date Implementation (2 KB)

Update: Dates for this script must have a specific ISO8601 format: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ (in UTC) where T and Z are literals.

• Requires PHP >= 5.10, due to the usage of PHP’s new DateTimeclass.
• The new DateTime object parses strings using PHP’s strtotime, so you don’t need to pass in an ISO8601 formatted date, as in JavaScript Pretty Date. Try “now”, or “next Wednesday”, or “+2 weeks 4 days 23 hours 9 seconds”.
• Extended to handle Months and Years in the past (JavaScript version only goes to weeks)

Usage:

// pass in a String DateTime, compared to another String DateTime (defaults to now)
$myString = Date_Difference::getStringResolved('-7 weeks');
$myString = Date_Difference::getStringResolved('-7 weeks', '+1 week');
 
// pass in a DateTime object, compared to another DateTime object (defaults to now)
// useful with the Propel ORM, which uses DateTime objects internally.
$myString = Date_Difference::getString(new DateTime('-7 weeks'));
$myString = Date_Difference::getString(new DateTime('-7 weeks'), new DateTime('+1 week'));

Download PHP Pretty Date (PHP 5.10+, 1.86KB)
http://www.zachleat.com/Projects/phpPrettyDate/Date_Difference.phps